This is an authorized facsimile of the original book, and 
was produced in 1972 by microfilm-xerography by University 
Microfilms, A Xerox Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. 



Swain School Lectures 



BY 



ANDREW INGRAHAM 

LATB HEAD-MASTER OP THE SWAIN FREE SCHOOL 
NEW BEDFORD, MASS. 



CHICAGO 
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING COMPANY 

LONDON 

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TROuNER& CO., Ltd. 

1903 






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TORmACE LOST CO^. 

1 9 1972 



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COPYRIGHT. 1903 

BY 

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CHICAGO 



^* ^. Public Uhrvy 
OCT 3 - 1939 



TYPOGRAPHY BY 
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TO 
EDWARD TUCK 



CONTENTS 



I. Psychology, about Minds . . . 
II. Epistemology, about Knowledges • 

III. Metaphysics, about Existences 

IV. Logic, about Things as Related 
V. A Universe of Hegel .... 

VI. Seven Processes of Language . 
VII. Nine Uses of Language . . . 
VIII. Many Meanings of Money . . 
IX. Some Origins of the Number Two 



rAGB 

9 

33 

57 

83 

103 

121 

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185 



Psychology 



ABOUT MINDS 






SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

PSYCHOLOGY 

ABOUT MINDS 

A ton of coal is exchanged at one place for 
two barrels of flour; at another place for one. 
An ounce of gold, which to-day buys thirty 
ounces of silver, was once bartered for sixteen 
ounces. All the antecedents that determine 
the ratio of exchange in an actual instance are 
never ascertained. In many actual instances, 
however, there have Ipeen disclosed features 
common to them. But the aspects, common 
or individual, arc operative mainly as they 
determine the states of mind of the two parties 
to a transaction. In other words, psychical 
elements are involved; and the business man 
succeeds or fails in part by reason of his 
greater or less knowledge of psychical facts 
and principles. 

These facts and principles are not those 
ultimate facts and principles which are dis- 
cerned by a few gifted and devoted students; 
for those profounder truths are as little likely 
as the doctrines of the Calculus of Variations 
to become the possession of many minds. 

9 



lO SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

There are psychical phenomena, it is plain, the 
knowledge of which is of universal and imme- 
diate applicability; and no one can go far in 
any walk of life without finding himself 
baflled by his ignorance of some point of 
psychology, though he may never have be- 
stowed that name on the sort of knowledge 
he needs. 

The teacher with his pupils; the orator 
before his audience; the actor facing his 
house; artists, statesmen, philosophers, — who 
is exempt from the necessity of knowing 
psychical facts, facts about the ideas, wishes, 
purposes, designs of his fellowmen? 

Palmistry, physiognomy, phrenology, astrol- 
ogy are names for sets of signs that have been 
believed to be indicative of psychical facts. 
Sculpture, painting, architecture, music, and 
poetry are certain processes for modifying 
psychical movements in a determinate way. 

A chemist weighs, measures, counts,, calcu- 
lates, and concludes that one gramme of that 
water contains one milligramme of chlorine. 
He is not always aware that he has learned 
considerable psychology on the way to this 
conclusion. No matter what the result, the 
beginnings are sights, smells, tastes, "feels" — 
in a word, sensations that have become modi- 
fied by countless repetitions. His training has 
consisted in discriminating amid a cluster of 



PSYCHOLOGY 1 1 

psychical elements something which he calls 
real, while rejecting the other elements as 
unreal. The chemist would miss his own aim 
if he should try to be at the same time a 
psychologist. He would have to attend to 
these rejected elements, and live over again a 
life which he must forget to succeed as a 
chemist. It is not for all persons, not even 
for all teachers, to be psychologists. With 
most people a little psychology, as Matthew 
Arnold said of mathematics, goes a great way. 
And yet a little psychology is likely to be very 
useful; to the majority of people more useful 
than a good deal. This little, if it be of a 
peculiar kind, is a good thing to* have when 
one is occupying his mind with dreams, appari- 
tions, ghosts, materializations, mind-cures, 
thought-transferences, — matters, i. e., about 
which men still disi)ute, not where among 
reals they are to be placed, but whether they 
are to be placed among real things at all. 

Besides Tcllus and Ceres the Roman peasant 
invoked twelve other gods who were asso- 
ciated with as many processes of husbandry: 
Vcrvactor with the first plowing of the fallow 
field; Reparator with the second plowing; 
Liiporcitor with the third and 'final plowing, 
by which the furrows were drawn and the 
hills heaped up; Insilor with the sowing; 
Obarator with the drawing of the plow over 



12 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

the ground after the sowing; Occa/ormth the 
working of the field over with the harrow; 
Sari/or with the uprooting of weeds with the 
hoe; Subruncinaioy with the pulling up of 
weeds with the hand; Mcssor with reaping; 
Convcctor with the bringing in of the grain; 
Conditor\\\\\\ stowing it away; Promt tor with 
the distribution of corn from bin and barn. 

This is but a fragment of the evidence that 
Usener and others have collected to the effect 
that the primitive Roman never plowed or 
sowed or reaped, never sheared his sheep or 
cut his own hair, never did any good or, for 
that matter, bad deed, without thinking on a 
god whose name was allied to a word that 
denoted the very act in which he was engaged; 
Plower, Sower, Harrower, Weeder, Shearer, 
and even Manurer. 

What are these gods? Where do they come 
from? If you and I believed that these were 
real beings, the problem would be like that of 
accounting for the origin of the moon, the 
oak-family or the human race. But we do not 
believe that such beings ever existed in reality. 
How then did it come to pass that anyone 
ever entertained such beliefs? This is a very 
different problem; not to account for the 
origin bf the gods, but for the origin of the 
belief in the gods, such gods, that is, as these 
that have just been named. If we do not 



PSYCHOLOGY I 3 

believe that these gods really existed and were 
known in some way, what could have been the 
experiences out of which the ideas of such 
beings originated? Let us try to imagine, at 
least in vague outlines, a possible solution. 
Hunters and fishers, even nomads, did not 
take kindly to the cultivation of the soil when 
their condition urged them to do it or starve. 
The feebler were forced to the arduous toil by 
the stronger; women and captives and slaves 
were driven to each occupation again and 
again, generation after generation, till at 
length a people of husbandmen were trained. 
But how hard was the task of learning these 
unwonted crafts! The memories of the tillers 
of the soil were one long array of masters, 
drivers and lords who either compelled them 
to the task, or instructed them how to perform 
it, or perhaps even assisted them to complete 
their labor and requited their efforts with 
some share of the product. Associations of 
the constant presence of an enforcer, director, 
helper or rewardcr with each subdivision of 
the peasant's employment from year to year 
would result, when the training had produced 
an ingrained habit, in the revival, at the proper 
season, of the image, the memory, of the 
forms which had summoned the thrall to his 
task; and this remembrance now would 
prompt him to the fulfilment of his duty, while 



14 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

his lips might implore the mercy or the kind- 
ness of the being who appeared to him in 
spirit with an actuality which was more real 
to him than reality itself is to many of our 
disillusioned philosophers. Blended memories 
of his own experiences, we may call these, the 
ideas of past impressions, associations which 
were to fade away when man should become 
adapted to his surroundings, and new tests of 
reality should be applied. *'Still the old 
instinct brings back the old names"; and 
*'0 Flower, help me now," **Do thou, O 
Sower, scatter the seed," *'May the good 
Weeder aid me," had a meaning to the 
haunted minds of early men. 

So may we explain these occasion-gods, as 
they might be called. You may accept the 
solution or reject it; I am not concerned now 
to defend or confirm it by arguments. My 
purpose has been served if I have made plain 
that there once prevailed a series of agricul- 
tural usages implying certain accompanying 
beliefs; that we may imagine them to have 
been preceded by certain experiences and that 
in those experiences were the origins of those 
beliefs. We have been attacking a psycho- 
logical problem and have essayed its solution 
in accordance with psychological principles. 
We have assumed that certain actions implied 
certain thoughts and feelings; that these psy- 



PSYCHOLOGY 1 5 

chical states grew out of definite experiences; 
that these experiences were determined by 
the environment; that it is possible for us to 
imagine what that environment was. 

Let us examine these assumptions and con- 
sider how we are to classify them, that is, 
determine what assumptions they most resem- 
ble of those with which we are already 
familiar. There are assumptions and assump- 
tions; and to ascertain which will be accepted 
and which will be rejected is itself a psychical 
problem. Thus does psychology meet us at 
every turn! 

We have assumed that certain actions are 
attended by feelings and thoughts. I appear 
to myself to be permanently debarred from 
testing this assumption directly. I hate and 
love, hope and fear, believe and disbelieve, 
reason and dream, — I do not know directly 
whether you do or not. What I seem to 
myself to be immediately aware of (even this 
immediacy often turns out to be a mistake) 
are sounds, colors, touches, and so forth. 
Stones and plants and beasts and men I be- 
hold; but minds are nowhere. If I could dis- 
sect a man, alive or dead, I should find no 
more of hopes and fears, beliefs and disbe- 
lievings than I should in any dog or log or 
clod. And here emerges another problem of 
psychology: How do I come to ascribe feel- 



1 6 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

ings and endeavors to some of the objects 
about me and to deny them of others? I am 
not asking now as an epistemologist might 
ask whether a belief that a toad has feelings 
and a flint no feelings is warranted by the evi- 
dence or not; I am only asking for some 
account of the origin of beliefs, not whether 
they are true or false. The pursuit of this 
inquiry would lead you to the discovery of 
many psychologies very different from any 
conception of the doctrine which you think 
prevails or ought to prevail. You will find 
psychologists who treat of the mind of God 
or of gods, of the feelings of demons and 
angels, of the souls of worlds and stars, of the 
thoughts of mountains and seas, of the doc- 
trine that animals are automata, of the ideas 
entertained by disembodied spirits, of the 
strange ideas imputed to stranger shapes 
which were thought to have inhabited the 
earth; but it is with none of these that the 
psychology I mean is occupied. This confines 
its attention to psychical phenomena that 
occur in connection with men and animals. 
Its range is even more restricted; for it does 
not include all the psychical phenomena that 
are alleged to be manifested in conjunction 
even with these, but only such as admit of 
being subjected to certain specifiable tests 
which will leave the least room for misinter- 



PSYCHOLOGY 1 7 

pretation. You will find, however, that this 
psychology has not a tenth as many culti- 
vators as the doctrine which most people in 
our country understand by the name psy- 
chology, if they understand anything by it at 
all. Their psychology busies itself with pre- 
cisely those things which the other has ex- 
cluded on the ground of its incompetence to 
determine any mode of investigation; namely, 
with telepathy, thought-transference, posses- 
sion, and the like. 

In pursuing the inquiry I have indicated, 
that is, in trying to find out how you come to 
ascribe feelings and endeavors to some of the 
objects about you and to deny them of others, 
you will learn that, even with the restriction of 
the scope of the psychologist's inquiry to the 
emotions and ideas of men and other animals, 
there has been much discussion whether these 
thoughts and sentiments were associated with 
the whole organism of an individual or limited 
to some part of his system. Thus at different 
times the blood, the marrow of the bones, the 
heart, the nerves have figured as the organ of 
psychical activity. Now, what is called the 
nervous system has, after long investigation 
and many confusions, been disentangled from 
the rest of the organism and show to be more 
intimately concerned with mental manifesta- 
tions than any other part of our frame. This 



1 8 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

doctrine of the correlation of nerve tissue and 
mental action is now taught dogmatically in 
our schools, and the evidences for or against 
it are treated with as much indifference as is 
usually accorded to the proof of doctrines that 
are held to have been established beyond 
doubt. But nerves are not mind, any more 
than stones are. It still appears that there is 
only one mind of which I have any direct and 
immediate knowledge. The movements of 
living beings around me I may ascribe to 
muscular changes. These muscular changes 
may be shown to be due to the excitation of 
the nerves. This excitation of the nerves 
may be produced by some chemical, mechan- 
ical, electrical, or other physical agency, or by 
something else which I do not find in the 
phenomena at all, but the presence of which 
I assume there. There may be as many 
minds as there are men, but each man has 
access to only one mind. What do you think 
would be the present knowledge of the struc- 
ture of hearts, if the only heart that each one 
could know were his own, and it were a phys- 
ical impossibility for him ever to see the heart 
of another? 

But this assumption that mind goes with 
nerve structure requires a few more words. 
It is not always assumed to go with all nerve 
structure, not with that of the dead, for 



PSYCHOLOGY 1 9 

instance, — not with all the nerve substance of 
the living, — not with any of it at all moments 
of life. Sometimes, then, where there is nerve 
tissue, there is mind, but is there mind where 
there is no nerve tissue? Some have said: 
^'Without nerve tissue no mind,'* and have 
even gone so far as to deny the existence of 
God on the ground that nowhere in the uni- 
verse is an adequate nervous system discover- 
able. At all events, they say, the scientific 
psychologist is limited for his ultimate data 
to his own mind and the nerves of others. 
These conflicting opinions reveal the depths 
of our ignorance. The relation among these 
different views may be exhibited very simply 
by means of diagrams or symbols, n stands 
for what has nerves, and ;;/ for what has mind. 

;/ m m n n 



71 


m 
m 


n 


7)1 


71 




71 




n 


71 


771 


71 


771 


71 


771 


n 


m 


71 


771 


71 
71 


771 . 
77t 


71 


771 






771 


ft 


fft 






771 


71 






m 














771 






77t 



n^m n(m 7i)m ;/ ) ( ?n 

Our second assumption in accounting for 
the (supposed) fact, that the mind of primitive 



20 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

man was haunted by a swarm ot occasion* 
gods, was that any psychical state grew out of 
certain experiences, implied certain previous 
mental states without which it would not have 
been. If our psychologist infers that a man 
knows Arabic, he assumes that the man has 
had certain experiences, has associated with 
Arabs or has consulted Arabic books; and he 
would refuse to entertain any other hypothesis 
in regard to the origin of this man's knowl- 
edge of Arabic until his assumptions concern- 
ing the previous experiences of the man were 
proved to be false. This, I say, is the assump- 
tion of our psychologist, not of those other 
psychologists who, I asserted, were much more 
numerous. This brings us to the considera- 
tion of the third assumption which this least 
numerous school of psychologists feels bound 
to make, that these experiences were deter- 
mined by the animal's (man or beast) sur- 
roundings at some spot or spots on the earth's 
surface. In this regard the position of the 
least numerous school of psychologists as 
against all others is: If, as you assert, psy- 
chical states are otherwise originated, the only 
way to establish your contention is to exhaust 
all the possibilities of our mode of explana- 
tion. 

Our psychologist then is limited to the con- 
sideration of psychical states, their interre- 



PSYCHOLOGY 21 

latlons and their relations to the animal 
organism and its environment, so far at least 
as these problems are essayable by methods 
of research that have approved themselves as 
having brought about agreement heretofore 
on disputed matters. His position, you see, 
is an isolated one. He stands contrasted not 
only with the hosts of telepathists, Christian 
scientists, spiritualists, obsessionists, posses- 
sionists, and the like, called by themselves and 
others psychologists; but he is also at variance 
with another class of whom an account is 
given in the lecture on metaphysics. He is, 
however, closely iakin to him who has been 
called an experimental, or a physiological, or 
a laboratory, or a mathematical psychologist. 
For the mathematicians, the physicists, the 
chemists, the physiologists, and their kind 
have begun to ask themselves if they may not 
perhaps help the psychologist in the answer- 
ing of his questions, though it must be 
admitted .that their help was not always 
thankfully welcomed, even on those rare 
occasions when it has been considerately 
proffered. It has sometimes been fancied by 
these earnest scientists to the great amaze- 
ment of the psychologist that the sensation 
blue, for example, is going to be identified 
with some movement or other property of the 
atoms of ether or nerve. It may be possible to 



22 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

enumerate the physical conditions of the sen- 
sation of blue; the physiological antecedents 
may be made out: the accompanying neural 
state may be determined; the psychical ele- 
ments that preceded it and made it feasible 
may be learned; it maybe proved to be really 
compound, simple though it appears; its con- 
stituents may be recognized; its ultimate dis- 
appearance may be foreseen and the mental 
state to follow predicted; yet the sensation of 
blue is something absolutely and inexplicably 
distinct and different from all these. What 1 
have here said of blue is true of any other 
color, any sound, taste, smell, and so forth, 
which appears to us simple. No explanation 
can explain my blue out of existence. I em- 
phasize this point, that the sensation blue 
is something peculiar, unique, stci generis; 
because I am compelled to read so much in 
which, partly from carelessness of expression, 
partly from confusion of thought, partly, one 
must admit, from the imperfection of language 
and from unavoidable brevity, the contrary is 
implied. When I read in Professor Pearson 
for instance: *'The mind is absolutely confined 
within its nerve exchange; beyond the walls 
of sense impression it can logically infer noth- 
ing," he seems to me to be confounding sensa- 
tions and nerves in a way that does not help 
me to understand psychical processes. That 



PSYCHOLOGY 23 

a mind has any relation to a brain is one of 
the latest discoveries that a mind makes. 

You see this desk, its distance, shape, size, 
color, perhaps the material of which it is 
made. You are aware too that you see these 
things. Now whether this table exists or not, 
or rather what the meaning of existence is, 
it is the claim of the metaphysician that it 
belongs to him to decide; and with his ques- 
tions we have nothing to do. Whether you 
know what you claim to know, or rather what 
the word knowledge should be taken to mean, 
is a matter the decision of which the episte- 
mologist desires should be reserved to himself; 
and the consideration of that point we leave 
to another occasion. But this conviction of 
yours that you see the distance, shape, and so 
forth, of this table is doubted and denied by 
many who have reflected on it. Among the 
first to call in question the belief which the 
philosophers among his contemporaries shared 
with the vulgar was Berkeley. "To Berkeley 
every virtue under heaven" is Pope's famous 
line; and those immortal dialogues reveal in 
their simple language not less the clear 
thought than the pure heart of the benevolent 
bishop. 

The psychologist's question is not whether 
that conviction of yours is true, not whether it 
is (epistemo)logically based, but what are the 



24 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

experiences out of which it has grown. It 
cannot be answered by recalling those expe- 
riences; no one remembers them. It cannot 
be answered by renewing those experiences; 
each bit of experience would suggest now 
implications which we cannot be sure that it 
would have suggested to unfurnished minds. 
How then can we find out anything about it? 
It is hard to give a generally intelligible 
answer. The process by which the philoso- 
pher attains to a different conception from 
yours of the nature of seeing is a part of that 
mental growth which in you has reached a 
stage in which he once was. His answer re- 
sembles that of the religious believer to the 
unconverted: You must live the life, if you 
would attain the vision. Do you know how 
the astronomers have reached their conviction 
that the solar system was developed from a 
nebulous expanse? Do you know how the 
geologists have arrived at the conclusion that 
the earth has been developing through long 
ages from a molten mass to its present diver- 
sified surface? How came biologists by their 
notion that all the varied forms of plants and 
animals have been slowly evolving through 
the lapse of years from a uniform protoplasmic 
jelly? Nay, that the eye itself did not precede 
seeing, but that the eye and seeing have been 
climbing the ascent of life together, each 



PSYCHOLOGY 2$ 

helpinpf the other, from the time when one 
was a mere pigment cell and the other a vague 
and dim sensation of dark and light? But all 
of these things were unknown to Berkeley, — 
Laplacian speculations about the origin of the 
solar system, geological theories of the earth's 
unfolding, the contributions ot Darwin and 
Haeckel and Huxley to our knowledge of the 
development of living structures and of the 
tissues of the eye, — the whole evolutionary 
philosophy as applied to every aspect of the 
world had no lodgment in his mind; and yet 
he discerned the evolution of the process of 
seeing. I will not say that all his arguments 
were sound. I will not say that he was not 
influenced by considerations that would have 
no weight with a modern evolutionist. I will 
not say that even now all difficulties have 
been overcome to my a'pprehension at least 
and that the theory is as clear to my mind as 
that of the common pump. There are some 
things which it is not given to all of us to 
understand but I am sure that any of you may 
have as clear a notion of this subject as I 
have. 

The contention is that along with the eye 
there went originally no consciousness but 
that of color; not even of color as we are con- 
scious of it, with its diversities of tints and 
definiteness . of outline; and that alone by 



26 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

itself this color sensation would never have 
resulted in what we now behold whenever we 
lift our eyelids. Berkeley's insistence was 
that this color experience was accompanied by 
another experience totally unlike it, and that 
the color-series had become so indissolubly 
associated with that other series as to suggest 
that other immediately; somewhat as words, 
which are totally unlike the ideas they stand 
for, yet call up those ideas in spite of our- 
selves. The puzzle of our being able to see 
things at a distance had not escaped the 
notice of curious men; nor had there been 
wanting, long before Berkeley, attempts at its 
solution; but, as often happens with first 
attempts, the solution missed the very thing 
to be explained. Some said that the mind 
went out through the eye to the object; others 
that emanations from the object came to the 
eye; while others dismissed the problem as 
insoluble, and others again declared that there 
was no problem to solve, that it was ''just 
e'en so from the beginning and that's an end 
on 't." Berkeley thought he had discovered 
that other experience which clung so tightly 
to color, in the combinations and organiza- 
tions of sensations of touch. These touch- 
sensations had themselves become greatly 
modified from what they originally were by 
being frequently repeated, felt in all sorts of 



PSYCHOLOGY 2/ 

successions and combinations, coalescing with 
one another and forming wholes whose parts 
were no longer distinguishable. The color- 
feelings blended with the touch-feelings till 
it became impossible for us to touch a surface 
without thinking of it as colored, or to have 
the color-sensation without thinking of the 
tangible surface. In short, Berkeley thought 
of the almost instantaneous glance by which 
one takes in a whole landscape, as a com- 
plex of a series of manifold inferences, all 
melted and merged into one. Others have 
discerned other elements in the process 
since, and the intricacy of the whole de- 
mands a volume for its exposition; as indeed 
on the physiological side the account of 
the structure and tissues of the eye demands 
no less. Listen to what he himself says: *'In 
treating of these things, the use of language 
is apt to occasion some confusion and obscu- 
rity, and create in us wrong ideas. For lan- 
guage, being accommodated to the common 
notions and prejudices of men, it is scarce pos- 
sible to deliver the naked and precise truth 
without great circumlocution, impropriety, 
and (to an unwary reader) seeming contradic- 
tion. I do therefore once for all entreat 
whosoever shall think it worth his while to 
understand what I have written concerning 
vision, that he should not stick in this or that 



28 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

phrase or manner of ^expression, but cordially 
collect my meaning from the whole sum and 
tenor of my discourse, and laying aside the 
words as much as possible, consider the bare 
notions themselves, and then judge whether 
they are agreeable to truth and his experience 
or no." 

We have forgotten the ardent zeal of the 
good bishop in commending the virtues of tar- 
water for the cure of all the ills of flesh. His 
scheme for civilizing the wilderness by estab- 
lishing a college at Bermuda seems strange to 
us now. We smile as we read: **Tell me, are 
we not obliged, if we believe the Mosaic ac- 
count of things, to hold the world was created 
not quite six thousand years ago?" Few will 
trouble themselves nowadays to determine 
whether his New Theory of Vision war- 
ranted all the conclusion that it seemed to the 
author to imply — that a material universe does 
not exist, and that a personal God does exist. 
But in our knowledge of psychical phenomena 
a great advance had been made, analogous to 
that which has recently taken place in our 
knowledge of the structure of the brain. This, 
it is asserted, is the result of the coalescence 
of some nine vertebral segments, thus disprov- 
ing Goethe's theory of the skull, and showing, 
in his case, as indeed in that of Berkeley, that 
praise was due to him for the spirit and nature 



PSYCHOLOGY 29 

of his discovery rather than for its exemption 
from an admixture of error. 

**We are the stuff that dreams are made of, 
and our little life is rounded with a sleep,** 
represents this universe of men and things as 
the dream-images of a sleeper, with all the 
implications of unreality, unsubstantiality, in- 
coherence, and uncertainty that we associate 
with dreams. The utterance has an emo- 
tional, a religious, a moral, perhaps an im- 
moral, effectiveness; but the psychologist 
seeks to assign dreams their place and to keep 
them from troubling the waking thought of 
himself and his friends. If he ventured to 
encroach on the jealously-guarded domains of 
his fraternal enemy, the metaphysician, and to 
hazard any statement about the sum of things, 
he might declare: "Sensations are the stuff 
that thou and all that is are made of, and thy 
little life upbeareth thy great world." 



Epistemology 



ABOUT KNOWLEDGES 



EPISTEMOLOGY 



ABOUT KNOWLEDGES 



There are not only lichens and planets, 
steamships and novels, Egyptian antiquities 
and bacteria, but knowledges. I show how 
knowledges differ from non-knowledges. I 
exhibit their rese mblanc es and differences, 
their groupin^^^tS^"^^^^:s^heir enchain- 
ments o"9:^S^feiH£f7Ert ^^^?|p^> too» many 
things thiyt Tiiy ff^H^ws-ctU^ simply 

because Udo nornnd m mose thiiws the char- 
acters I inlK;ffc<jUv.tl^t' tcrnio.^ii^wledgcs are 
psychical slTtKs^ ;::: — jai-LXi44i^^ ;^T(jiices are psy- 
chical states. Science itself, i. e., all the sciences 
or their common element, is a psychical state. 
Botany is a psychical state; but we call a book 
a Botany, and we Si)eak of botanical phenom- 
ena, meaning plants and their qualities and 
relation. If all mankind should perish, the 
book might remain, the plants might remain, 
let us suppose; but there would be no science, 
no botany. Would there then be no botany if 
all mankind should sink into profound sleep? 
Surely there would be no psychical states, and 
consequently no knowledge, an(.l hence no sci- 
ence. A man loses consciousness in a swoon 

33 



34 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

and recovers it again. So knowledge comes 
and goes; and if we say a botanist knows 
more than he is conscious of at any instant, we 
merely express the possibility of this recur- 
rence. It is with respect to the possibility of 
these revivals that he differs from the layman 
who never knew and never will know botany. 
Knowledges then are psychical states and 
they are readily discriminated by most from 
the stat(is which we name- pleasures and pains, 
hopes and fears, loves and hates, desires, en- 
deavors; and as they have been already col- 
lected under a general term, we need not 
enumerate all the particulars, but call them at 
once wills and emotions. An emotion of one 
man may be like an emotion of another; you 
might say, though you would not mean, that 
the two were experiencing the same emotion. 
Now how minds became alike or rather how 
there came to be a set of objects which resem- 
bled one another to such a degree that one 
name should be applicable to any one of them 
is one of that host of questions the answer to 
which was sought by Darwin and given in 
terms which differed widely from those which 
conveyed the answers of others. Whatever 
origins the resemblances among animals may 
have had, such resemblances are one of the 
conditions of knowledge, The primary crite- 
rion by which one ascertains that a conscious- 



EPISTEMOLOGY 35 

ness of his is a knowledge, is the discovery 
that other minds resemble his in that partic- 
ular. Knowledge, that is to say, is a social 
product; without society, no knowledge. 
Without this comparison of mind and mind, 
without the conditions that made this compar- 
ison possible, there would be nothing which I 
should call knowledge. It is not merely this 
agreement in a number of minds that makes 
of a consciousness a knowledge, but it must be 
accompanied with the additional consciousness 
that this agreement exists. This, however, is 
only a negative criterion. Nothing is knowl- 
edge which does not stand this test; but much 
that stands this test is not knowledge. It is 
not enough that I agree with others and that 
I am aware of that agreement, there must be 
an absence of condicting states of conscious- 
ness. With animals, with most men, and with 
every man on some occasions and on some 
subjects, this second test is the only one that 
is, I can hardly say applied, but involved; and 
that too with no thought of the necessity of 
the first test and still less of any other. From 
this primitive, uncritical state many never are 
aroused; they never awake from this dogmatic 
slumber. It is better perhaps not to see a test 
of the knowledge-quality of a consciousness in 
this individual conviction, nor yet in the inten- 
sity of the conviction. It is surely not applied 



36 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

by primitive men, but it is applied by philoso- 
phers to vindicate as knowledges certain ine- 
radicable beliefs of their own which either 
cannot be established by any other tests or 
have failed to stand them. Observe that it is 
only under the point of view of your personal 
conviction, regarded as a test of your knowl- 
edge, that I have permitted myself to bring 
together such unlike things as a belief that 
has never been doubted and a belief which 
has triumphed over all doubts and annihilated 
them. 

Knowledges are intellectual states; let us 
say in one word, intellections; but all intellec- 
tions are not knowledges. By what third 
criterion can a knowledge-intellection be dis- 
tinguished from any other? By their relative 
clearness and distinctness, has been replied. 
Clearness refers to the relation of the intellec- 
tion to other consciousnesses of the individual; 
distinctness to its internal structure. This is 
one criterion, but it is not a sufficient crite- 
rion; though it has been considered such not 
only by the generality of mankind, but by 
many eminent philosophers. Among the 
latter was Descartes, who said: **I believed 
myself to be able to assume as a general rule 
that everything that I conceived clearly and 
distinctly was true." An intellect like that of 
Descartes wins a great many bits of knowl- 



EPISTEMOLOGY 37 

edge from the void and formless infinite by 
the rigid adherence to this principle, because 
it discerns obscurities and difficulties and has 
the force to remove them ; but the insufficiency 
of the principle, even in the control of a 
Descartes, for discriminating knowledges from 
what may be mistaken for them, is evident 
enough when we consider how many of his 
knowledges have failed to stand the severer 
tests which modern thought demands. 

Observe, however, that in determining what 
intellection is a knowledge, and what intellec- 
tion is not a knowledge, all the tests I have 
enumerated and all that I shall enumerate are 
necessary. It may be that the combined man- 
ifestation of them all is necessary. It may be 
that even then the discrimination is not as 
perfect as it will become hereafter. Some 
faikire will admonish us of that, but repeated 
failures have already abundantly admonished 
us that no one criterion ever proposed has 
been sufficient. 

Your personal conviction, your agreement 
with others, no matter how many, your con- 
sciousness of such agreement, the clearness 
and distinctness of your idea, — if all these do 
not warrant you in declaring your conviction a 
knowledge, where, pray, does knowledge 
emerge? Well, we might say that it has 
emerged already, and not object in every-day 



38 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

talk to apply the name of knowledge to con- 
ceptions that exhibited all, or even some of the 
characteristics only, that I have already enu- 
merated; but what I am trying to do is to 
make plain that the word knowledge, in de- 
fault of a better word and to avoid a strange 
term, such as cognition, is coming to be used 
in a very precise and definite signification 
which requires as a fourth test that the intel- 
lection to which it is applied should have been 
analyzed, as far as possible, into the elements 
and relations of which it is composed by the 
process of comparing and contrasting it with 
other intellections, and determining wherein it 
is like and wherein it is unlike those others. 
I might linger on this process and develop in 
your minds, by an array of examples, the 
intuition of its nature as I conceive it. This 
process discloses the likeness of different con- 
ceptions and the differences of like' concep- 
tions. It bears us away from those associations 
which custom and language and tradition have 
woven around us. It reveals to us new worlds 
amid the old, and remoulds for us our inner 
life and the aspect of nature. It generates 
those classes with which logic has to deal; and 
it lights the way for us to behold the remain- 
ing features that an intellection must possess 
to be called, by us at least, a knowledge, a 
cognition. 



EPISTEMOLOGY 39 

Now this analysis discloses in any intellec- 
tion a set of elements and relations among 
elements. Between any two of these elements 
are exhibited numerous relations. Here 
comes the fifth examination to which those 
consciousnesses, those ideas, those intellec- 
tions, those beliefs, those faiths, those sur- 
mises, those suspicions, those theories, those 
hypotheses, in brief, all those psychical states 
must be submitted that are discontented with 
their station and aspire to rise, if it may not 
be to sink, to the rank of knowledges. Let 
us then fix our attention on one of the couples 
that our analysis has disclosed. Let the ele- 
ments be denoted by a and ^, and the relation 
between them by r. Our question now is: 
This intellection of the relation between a and 
b, — is it a knowledge? If it is not, then the 
whole of which it forms a part is not a knowl- 
edge; and, for this elementary intellection to 
be allowed to rank as a knowledge, we must 
ill addition to the tests to which we have 
already subjected it, find that it survives the 
following tests: 

Suppose that in one set of circumstances, in 
one group of consciousnesses, a and b occur 
in the relation r, and that when the circum- 
stances change, a and b still occur in the same 
relation to each other; and that this relation 
persists, when the accompanying group has 



40 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

undergone another change; and so on, until 
the environment has changed as frequently 
and as completely as possible; then, as far as 
this test is concerned, this intuition of the 
relation between a and b is entitled to rank as 
a knowledge, but only so far as this one crite- 
rion is involved. Before it can be made free 
of the realm, it must undergo still further 
tests. (Method of Agreement.) 

Let there be two sets of circumstances as 
closely alike as we can find or make them, 
and suppose that into one of these we intro- 
duce a but not into the other, and b emerges 
in the relation r to a amid the conditions into 
which we had introduced a, but not into the 
other, then we have one more reason for call- 
ing this intellection a knowledge. (Method 
of Differences.) 

Suppose, in the third place, that while every- 
thing else remains the same, the variations in 
a are accompanied by variations in <J, that, as 
the phrase goes, they vary ^^concomitantly," 
then we have this additional ground for call- 
ing this relation between a and b a knowledge. 
(Method of Concomitant Variation.) 

Anyone who has ever done any cooking 
and attempted to follow a recipe, will under- 
stand that a great many precautions must be 
taken in the employment of these tests, famil- 
iarity with which can only be acquired by 



EPISTEMOLOGV 41 

repeated trials. It is plain, too, from what we 
said at the outset about knowledge being a 
social product that these experiences must 
not only be repeated by one's self, but that 
others must go through like experiences and 
attain like results, before what we call knowl- 
edge can make its appearance. 

It seems cruel to refuse the title of knowl- 
edge to a psychical state that has survived all 
these tests. The great majority of men em- 
ploy, and insist on employing, the term in a 
much less precise signification. But there are 
some who are not content even yet; they will 
not call this isolated intellection knowledge 
even when it has satisfied all these require- 
ments. They contend that there must be 
many similarly established intellections whose 
relations to each other have been tested by 
the processes by which each single intellection 
has been tested, till the whole forms a system 
of interrelated elements, a science. 

All this merely means that epistemologists, 
or the cultivators of the knowledge of knowl- 
edges, like the cultivators of other sciences, 
have not yet come to an agreement alnong 
themselves as to the definition of knowledge, 
nor do they all classify knowledges in the 
same way. I permit myself to think that 
there is no one classification, but that there 
are and always will be a number of classifica- 



42 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

tions one of which will best serve one purpose 
and another another; but that no classification 
is possible which will answer all purposes for 
which man wants knowledge. Even knowl- 
edge itself is by no means an universal want. 
There are great peoples that have no such 
knowledges as we have been trying to charac- 
terize. It does not seem likely to be attain- 
able by the bulk of any civilized communities. 
The very idea of taking such pains is distaste- 
ful to many cultivated persons. The diffi- 
culties in the way of anyone wishing to 
become an epistemologist are so numerous 
that few would attempt it if it were not for the 
fact that many a man believes himself to be 
an epistemologist already. The presumption 
,of those who pretend to know something 
about knowledges has this merit, that it stimu- 
lates the desire of others to know. But just 
see what are some of the unavoidable diffi- 
culties, difficulties I mean which will always 
exist, even when every man shall become as 
passionately eager for knowledge as Kant 
himself, difficulties which not even a Kant can 
surmount. 

You wish to become a mineralogist. You 
collect minerals; you examine and compare 
them. You weigh them; you measure their 
angles; you expose them in a variety of ways 
to heat and light; you break and grind them 



EPISTEMOLOGY 43 

and mix them with chemicals; you visit various 
localities and ascertain the sources of the 
minerals; you compare your views with those 
of others. But why make a long story of it? 
After half a life-time spent in this way, you 
are merely a mineralogist. But you wish to 
become an epistcmologist. Then it merely 
remains for you to occupy the rest of your life 
in acquiring, in a similar manner chemistry, 
botany, zoology, psychology. But is not the 
idea absurd that anyone should ever think of 
becoming an epistcmologist? Why, you might 
say, what you call an epistcmologist is what we 
others call a philosoj^her, one who takes all 
knowledge for his province. But the philoso- 
phers are all dead; I doubt if any philosopher, 
in your sense of the word, will ever walk the 
earth again. He has fissiparously left a brood 
that care little for their ancestor or for one 
another. The "natural philosophers" fell off 
long ago, and those who were left behind 
regarded the dissidents with scorn, and ridi- 
culed the Hnglish for caUing mere scientists 
philosophers. Then the psychologists broke 
away, and found too much to occupy them- 
. selves with in their own restricted province. 
Moralists, sociologists, ethnologists are also a 
part of the progeny; and there are left still 
hardly more than the epistcmologist and the 
metaphysician to dispute about the division 



44 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

of what remains of the old estate; and a hard 
time enough they have of it in ascertaining 
what belongs to each alone and what they 
must continue to hold in common. The pres- 
ent arrangement appears to be that the episte- 
mologist limits himself to knowledges and the 
metaphysician is restricted to realities. 

Knowledges have been divided into mediate 
and immediate. It is by no means settled 
where the line between the two is drawn. 
The beginnings of consciousness are not the 
beginnings of knowledge. The analysis of 
neither leads us to any elements which we 
can regard as more than provisionally ulti- 
mate. And surely the elements which we 
regard for the time being as ultimate in the 
one are not those which we regard as ultimate 
in the other. All knowledges are psychical 
states, but there are many psychical states 
which are not knowledge and which in part 
precede knowledge. In this aspect all knowl- 
edges are mediate, and the laws of knowledge 
derivative laws, — particular cases of more 
general psychical laws. The ultimate ele- 
ments of knowledge are certain persistences 
and recurrences amid the throng of psychical , 
states. The belief that the earth is ninety odd 
million miles from the sun is entertained by 
thousands of people. Their conviction is 
ineradicable. How it has become so is a 



EPISTEMOLOGY 45 

psychological story that might differ from per- 
son to person. To a few only is it knowledge; 
a few only have subjected this belief to those 
tests which the belief must survive to be called 
knowledge in anyone's mind. Even here 
there would be great differences. One would 
discern that his belief of the sun's distance 
depended on his knowing that the sum of the 
angles of a triangle is equal to two right 
angles; while another would encounter no 
mathematical or physical belief, but would 
resolve his knowledge (for we have assumed 
it to be knowledge in his case) into certain 
beliefs in regard to the credibility of human 
testimony. The belief that the angle-sum in 
a triangle is two right angles is inferred in 
different minds from different data. 

The distinction then between mediate and 
immediate knowledge is that between any 
knowledge-group and the elements from which 
it is compounded. From the latter the former 
are said to be inferred; but the elements were 
not reached without inferences. What is this 
inference-relation? 

In the past the logician occupied himself 
with a number of heterogeneous subjects. He 
mingled with the study of classes and their 
relations the study of inference-relations; and 
this in part because the latter were supposed 
to depend on the former. As I conceive it, 



46 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

the doctrine of inferences belongs to the epi- 
stemologist; at any rate, the logician has mate- 
rial enough in class-relations to keep him busy 
for some years yet. An inference, as the 
anticipation of a storm from the aspect of the 
heavens or the surmise that a man has walked 
along the shore from marks on the sand, re- 
quires a memory of an association of two 
things, a and by the presence of something 
like/?, followed by the consciousness of some- 
thing like b. This is the general scheme, but 
there are three modifications which indeed 
merge into each other, but in the developed 
consciousness are sufficiently distinct to have 
received different names: transduction, induc- 
tion, and deduction. The results of these 
processes do not, any more than the results of 
other psychical processes, become knowledges 
until they have withstood the tests already 
enumerated. These three words imply mean- 
ings which I do not intend to convey. They 
are simply the least unsatisfactory terms I can 
find. When from the experience of a and b 
together we suspect that every a is accom- 
panied by b, we have an induction, but some 
apply the term to thoroughly tested conclu- 
sions of this kind and others use it of any 
general relation however obtained. If we, 
upon the actual occurrence of an a, divine the 
presence of b because we believe that a b goes 



EPISTEMOLOGY 47 

With every a, we have a deduction. When, 
however, the presence of a suggests b simply 
on the ground of some remembrance of the 
conjunction of the two without any warrant 
that a and b are often found together, we have 
a transduction. 

The comparison and the contrasting of 
knowledges or rather of candidates for the 
title of knowledges, the resolving of them into 
their elements and the putting of these ele- 
ments together again, the making of induc- 
tions, transductions, inductions, the repeated 
testing of these by the methods of agreement, 
difference, concomitant variation, and a multi- 
tude of others, are processes which are being 
executed by merchants, lawyers, manufac- 
turers, scientists, logicians, physicians, farm- 
ers, laborers with more or less exactitude 
and success; but all that these care for 
is the result of the processes; the episte- 
mologist is interested in the processes them- 
selves, not merely as psychical states, but 
as generating knowledges. He rejoices in 
the discovery of any new criterion by which 
the separation of knowledges from foreign 
admixtures may be effected. As episte- 
mologist (as epistcmologist, observe, he may 
be at the same time an epicure and a 
humanitarian) the utility, the beauty, the 
nobility, the sanctity of a long-accredited mass 



48 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

of supposed knowledge, lie disregards com- 
pletely, when considering the question of 
admitting it to his museum of knowledges. It 
may be that the belief will always retain those 
attributes after its knowledge-quality has been 
taken away from it; he does not care. It 
may be that these ascriptions of praise will 
one after the other dwindle away from the 
belief, now that its knowledge-element has 
vanished; still he does not care. Anguish of 
hearts, domestic disharmonies, civil strife, 
world-wide confusion may be known, even by 
his refined tests of knowledge, to be the con- 
sequences of the new discrimination; he 
heeds it not at all. Indeed, there is no such 
ruthless tame animal living as is your episte- 
mologist ... in his study. 

But however extensive his collection of 
knowledges may be, or may become, there 
are two knowledges which each epistemologist 
wishes to add to his collection. One of these 
concerns the classification of knowledges 
among realities and their relation to other 
realities, if any meaning can be attached to 
that word. For some contribution to this 
department, he has long awaited the report of 
the metaphysician, and incidentally made 
incursions into the realms of the latter on his 
own account. The other concerns the ultimate 
analysis of knowledge, its elements, its priii- 



{ 



EPISTEMOLOGY 49 

ciples, Its constituents ... we must multiply 
terms here, for we do not know this as yet, 
and therefore do not know exactly what we 
want to know. It requires much experience 
of answers to frame a question rightly. The old 
analysists asked their questions boldly, and 
expected to find some such answer as 7 or 8; 
but they got fractions, negatives, zeros, 
infinities, imaginary and complex quantities,, 
with which they did not know what to do. 
These are seen now to contain answers to 
questions which lurked unnoticed in the 
original question. Similarly, the epistemol- 
ogist's question, simple as it may seem, 
involves, I take it, a number of different ques- 
tions. He who asks, as Kant did, **How is 
knowledge possible?" .should have explained 
more fully than Kant did just what he meant 
by such ambiguous terms as hozu and possible 
and knoivlcdgc. 

This ultimate question of the *'knowIedgist** 
has shared the fate of many philosophical 
questions; to be answered, proved unanswer- 
able, considered as futile, scorned as meaning- 
less. Again, when the question was first 
asked, the universe was for men full of dis- 
tinctions, — God and Devil, Heaven and Hell, 
reason and sense, body and soul, organic and 
mineral, species and species, faculty and 
faculty; and moreover these distinctions were 



50 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

not only thou<:;:ht to be indefeasible, but to be 
indissolubly bound up with human happiness 
and virtue. Whatever may have been held 
by divines and philosophers, I cannot see that 
any question in which they are interested is 
affected in its decision by the ultimate analysis 
of knowledge that may -be adopted more than 
it is by the ultimate analysis of air. Really, it 
is time to discern that the freedom of the will, 
the immortality of the soul, the existence of 
God are as independent as the diameter of 
the earth of the analysis of knowledge into 
its elements. There are many good things 
besides knowledges within our reach. 

The question is, what are the ultimate con- 
stituents of knowledges, of knowledge? 
Knowledges are a peculiar kind of psychical 
states. We have seen how they are dis- 
tinguished from other psychical states. What 
elements have they taken up into themselves? 
Sensations; that is admitted on all hands. 
Anything else? Is space a sensation? Is time 
a sensation? Are species, genera, and classes 
sensations? Are the ideas of freedom, of 
immortality, sensations ? This is denied on 
all hands. What are they then? Compounds 
of successive sensations, say many; and they 
endeavor to establish their assertion by essay- 
ing the analysis of these ideas into sensations 
with some measure of success, as they think. 



EPISTEMOLOGY 5 1 

The answer of pre-Kantian philosophers was 
that these objects are realities about which the 
mind is in some way conversant. Kant's 
answer was a reversal of this; and he con- 
ceived that his theory was related to the pre- 
vious theories as the Copernican theory of 
the universe to the Ptolemaic, as the helio- 
centric to the geocentric hypothesis. Kant 
said, These are ultimate constituents of mind, 
without which there would be no experience, 
which make experience possible, which are 
not products of experience, but which shape 
and mould experience, and determine our per- 
ceptions, our reasonings, and our conduct. 
They are subdivided— these determinative 
constituents of mind are — into the forms of 
sense, that is, space and time, whence percep- 
tions and the order of the universe, and such 
sciences as geometry and mechanics; the 
categories of the understanding, that is, 
quantity, quality and relation, whence species 
and genera, and the foundations of the 
science of logic; the ideas of reason, that is, 
God, Immortality and Freedom, whence the 
ideals of religions and ethics. These forms, 
categories, ideas, on the one hand, and sensa- 
tions on the other, are the elements of knowl- 
edges. They are blended in every actual 
knowledge; they are themselves distinct, dis- 
parate, incomparable, admitting no derivation 



52 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

of the one from the other. Both elements are 
necessary to knowledge, the sense-element, no 
less than that with which Kant contrasts it. 
Hence, as sciences, metaphysics and theology 
are impossible; for Kant could find no material 
in our present life to which the moulds of 
reason could be related as the moulds of sense 
and the moulds of the understanding had 
been found by Kant to be related to their con- 
tents. These forms of reason, these ideas 
have a function; namely, a regulative one, a 
moral and aesthetic value. 

Kant's view of knowledge is one among 
many. No one of them has become itself a 
knowledge, has passed the tests we have, 
enumerated, Kant's as little as any. Aristotle, 
Aquinas, Hegel, Spencer and thousands on 
thousands besides have tried to solve the 
problem of the origin, nature and limits of our 
knowledge. As the character of the problem 
comes to be better understood, the attempted 
answers appear less and less satisfactory. We 
are not so near omniscience as philosophers 
are inclined to suppose, and any attempt to 
exhibit the science in all its parts and as a 
whole, would be and remain an attempt 
merely. Should Kant himself come back to 
life, I do not think that many things would 
astonish him; they would all fit easily into his 
system, the Roentgen rays and all; but when 



EPISTEMOLOGY 53 

he should learn what the mathematicians and 
the psychologists have made out of that space 
which had seemed to him so simple! He 
would hear of point-spaces and line-spaces, of 
spaces of four dimensions, of spaces in which 
the proposition about the angle-sum of a 
triangle does not hold true; and all this from 
the geometers. And he would hear the 
psychologists discussing the origin of the con- 
sciousness of space and seeking to ascertain 
whether there are any universal and necessary 
elements in that space which for Kant was not 
analyzable into elements at all. Would he 
refrain from saying to himself, "Truly we 
epistemologists were as were the chemists 
before the days of Sir Humphrey Davy, when 
salt was held to be an element; and we must 
have many more knowledges before we have 
a complete knowledge of knowledges'? 

Ah, but knowledge is then a knowledge of 
something. Of what ? But for answers to 
that question, you must consult the metaphy- 
sician. 



Metaphysics 



ABOUT EXISTENCES 



METAPHYSICS 

ABOUT EXISTENCES 

**We are botanists/* say the first, "we have 
the science of plants." **But there are no 
plants," say the others. Is it possible to 
imagine that the botanists will ever find that 
others will deny the existence of the very 
things the botanists profess to know? We can 
already dispense with the madder, the vanilla, 
and even the vine; perhaps we shall be able to 
get along without vegetable life some day. 
Will the sons of the seventh sons of botanists 
be botanists still, and will all the sons of all 
the rest cry out, *'Thcre never were any 
plants"? And may some of the botanists then 
respond, *'It is even so; there never were any 
plants; there never will be, at least, in any 
sense that you attach to the word 'being,* but 
in a higher, nobler, diviner sense, they are 
forever." 

Worse than this imagined state of the future 
botanists is that of the metaphysicians to-day. 
"We are metaphysicians," they say, "we 
know . . . ours is the knowledge of . . . we 
have the science of . . . of , . . of . . . of." 
"Of what, pray"? asks some impatient earth- 

57 



$8 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

ling. **Of God, of Heaven and Hell, of a 
Future State, of the Beginning and Ending of 
the Universe?" What will be the reply of the 
metaphysicians? I hesitate somewhat to 
report it. I may have failed to understand it. 
Many a metaphysician may rise up and say, 
*'Such is not my answer." There has never 
been a Congress of Metaphysicians pure and 
simple; rather, '^Journals of Pure and Applied 
Metaphysics." They arc so different from us 
others. They have to use our language in 
talking with us; but we soon become aware 
that, though they may resemble us in having 
ideas, the ideas themselves are so unlike our 
own that the same language is the same only 
in sound. But in this respect we fare no worse 
with the metaphysician than with the adept in 
any other science. What the mathematician 
may mean by "tangent" is something so 
different from what we mean, that we might 
not be able to comprehend him after all his 
efforts to make himself understood. A *'tan- 
gent" maybe to him the limit of the sum of 
any infinite number of terms of a certain con- 
verging series; and he would explain to us 

1 . »4 • n 44 • M (4 J> 1 441« • »> 

what series, convergmg, sum, and limit 
mean. So far we discern no difference 
between the mathematician and the meta- 
physician; both use equally unintelligible 
language. The difference emerges later. All 



METAPHYSICS 59 

the statements of the mathematician are 
exemplified by material found within the 
range of a human experience; the meta- 
physician, by his own declaration, is endeavor- 
ing to transcend the limitations of human 
experience. No wonder then that I hesitate 
to report his answer to the earthling's ques- 
tion; but it would seem to be about as follows: 

*'We remember that men used in the brave 
old days to resort to our predecessors for the 
answers to their questions about God and 
Eternity; some continue to do so; but we no 
longer think that the people's imaginings 
about the Universe are to be allowed any 
influence on our purely scientific, objective, 
and disinterested investigation. To state our 
case strongly: If there were no Earth, no 
Heaven and no God, and if we were in Hell, 
the problems of metaphysics would remain 
the same; the only difference being that we 
might have less inclination, if more leisure, to 
attend to them." 

Suppose, as will presently be the case, that 
we have all left the room, what will be here 
then? **Settees, chairs, tables, books," you 
reply. How do you know? **P>om experience 
if not of this, of similar relations. In the first 
place, if we come back, we find these things 
here." But how do you know that they were 
here while 3^ou were away? "It has often 



60 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

happened that while some left the room, 
others stayed; and again when another set 
left the room, yet others stayed and so on in 
all possible combinations of the occupants of 
the room; and we have found on comparing 
our experiences that in no case did the 
departure of some, so far as the others who 
were left could observe, make any difference 
in these things. Hence we have concluded 
that the departure of all of us from the room 
has left books, settees and desks just as we 
knew them. Moreover, on our return we have 
often found the hands of a clock, the sands of 
an hourglass, the logs on the fire, in a 
different position from that in which we had 
left them indeed, yet having undergone only 
such changes as we had frequently observed 
them to undergo when we have been present. 
When we are remote from the room, we retain 
a representation of the room, which we call 
our knowledge of the room; and if it is ques- 
tioned, we test, or verify, our knowledge by 
going to the spot and comparing our repre- 
sentation with the locality itself; or when a 
second resort to the place has appeared 
undesirable, we have had recourse to some of 
the numerous indirect ways which all involved 
the same process of testing an idea by com- 
paring it with the reality. For these are our 
realities; books, chairs, settees, tables, and 



METAPHYSICS 6 1 

such as these are the realities of which we 
say that we have knowledge when the ideas 
we form of them have been tested in the 
ways which the epistemologist prescribes. 
These were before we were born and will be 
when we arc dead. Our- sleeping and our 
waking affect them not. We want no other 
realities than these. When we say that 
angels exist, that God exists, we mean just 
what we mean when we say that this book or 
that tree exists. When we talk of the knowl- 
edge of the thing, the knowledge and the 
thing are not identical but distinct; the 
knowledge is a psychical state, the thing 
is . . . is". . . "What," asks the meta- 
physician . . . *'is ... is the thing, the 
reality, not a psychical state". 

I trust that I have done no injustice to your 
views by the expressions that I have ascribed 
to you. Have not some philosophers the same? 
Then the metaphysician must appear to you 
a . . . something quite different from what 
you are. He amuses you. You recall the 
useful Irishman: "Pat, what are you standing 
there for in front of the mirror with your 
eyes shut?" "I'm trying to see how I look 
when I am asleep." The metaphysician 
appears to you to be trying to see how things 
look when no one is looking at them. Some 
fine day a sort of Roentgen ray may pass 



62 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

through Pat*s closed eyelids, and the laugh 
will be on his side then. But I am not certain 
that the metaphysician will be any nearer his 
aim by such a vision. 

You are sure of your ground. There things 
arc; open your eyes and see them; reach out 
your hand and touch them. What you like 
is plain common sense; and this is the view of 
common sense. 

Poor, simple, misguided, mistaken folk. 
Enter, not the metaphysician, but the man of 
science; which you value now-a-days even 
above common sense. What does he say? 
"You may think of the room you have quitted 
in terms of your consciousness when there; 
and you may get along well enough with your 
associates in doing so; but I cannot do any 
thing of the kind. Do you not know that the 
clock is not ticking in your absence? It is 
moving and setting particles of air in motion 
There is no sound in the untenanted room. 
Do you not know that your sight of the room 
results from the stirring of the nerves of the 
eye by movements of the ether? There are 
no sights, there is no light even in the un- 
occupied room. No room is warm when no 
one is in it. The chairs and tables appear as 
systems of molecules and atoms, with inter- 
spaces immensely greater than the diameters 
of the molecules themselves. In the room 



METAPHYSICS 63 

where there is not a single soul, there are no 
sounds, no sights, no tastes nor touches nor 
odors, nothing but ether and atoms; perhaps 
ether alone, for some of us have found a way 
of imagining the molecules as formed out of 
ether. That is the way I think of it." So 
far some scientist. 

But the uninhabited space of science as little 
satisfies the metaphysician as the uninhabited 
space of common sense. **This ether," he 
says, "and these atoms are only the counter- 
glare of your common-sense experience.'* 
Waves of water and bullets of lead — these, 
attenuated, diminished, refined, flung through- 
out space, are the original of your conceptions. 
They explain nothing and have no other 
justification in my judgment than that they 
serve as counters to calculate with, the result 
in any case requiring to be translated into the 
realities of common sense. These things are 
only what you imagine them to be there. My 
question is: "What is there"? and the answers 
to this question will give me what I shall call 
Realities of Existence. 

Again, here is an apple; it has certain 
qualities; it is different from its qualities; its 
qualities change; we can say of it: It is red, it 
is round, it is mellow. What is this "it" that 
we are talking about? The qualities, it is said, 
cannot exist by themselves; they belong to 



64 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

something. We will call this something, 
whether we find it or not and whatever it may 
turn out to be, the Principle of Substance, or 
the substance-reality. 

Again, when we say that every event has a 
cause (and you do not question this), we want 
to know the real cause and do not want to be 
put off with merely sham causes, we want the 
principle of cause or the cause-reality. By this ^ 
is not meant what the layman or the scientist 
calls cause, not the sensible or the objective 
cause, not any merely conceived cause; but a 
cause the reality of which is, in some way, 
guaranteed as independent of our experience. 

I come now to the assignment of yet another 
metaphysical principle. You would say that 
there exist in nature what you call classes. 
But these classes, for you, consist of a number 
of individuals which resemble one another, do 
they not? . Now have you ever thought what 
this implies? There are cats, trees, whales, 
and so forth; if you arc asked whether an 
object is a cat or not, you compare it with per- 
ceived or remembered cats, and according to 
its likeness or unlikeness to these you decide 
whether it is a cat or not. What, I ask, is the 
foundation of this resemblance? How came -\ 
these objects to resemble one another, unless 
there is a something which they have in com- 
mon? Is not this common something one 



!; : 






V. 



METAPHYSICS 6$ 

thing; and yet present in each and every one 
of the objects which you call cats, for instance? 
No two of these cats are precisely alike; they 
all differ in countless particulars; and yet 
each as a cat, somehow partakes of the nature 
of that cat-reality which determines it to be 
that which it is so far as it is a member of the 
class of cats. This cat, the real cat, which is 
latent in each phenomenal cat, this meta- 
physical entity, this being the reality of which 
immeasurably transcends the so-called reality 
of those things which the layman and the 
scientist call real, is a ttnivcrsal; and there 
would seem to be as many universals as there 
are distinct or different classes. These uni- 
versals I will call the Principles of Classes or 
the class-realities. These principles of meta- 
physics, to even a greater degree than any 
other, have occupied the thoughts of men, if 
we may judge by the number of books extant 
and the fame of their expounders. Where 
hundreds now gather to hear Weierstrass or 
Lord Kelvin explain their great discoveries in 
the sciences of which they are respectively 
masters, thousands once flocked to listen to 
the disclosures of the great thinkers on the 
doctrine of universals, an Anselm or a William 
of Champcaux. 

I have not yet finished the enumeration of 
the principles or, if you please, the realities of 



66 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

the metaphysicians. Here, emerges another: 
Is each individual a member of an infinite 
number of classes, or is there always one class, 
to which in strict sense it may be said properly 
to belong, — a class of one? Metaphysicians 
have chosen the second alternative. Now 
what is there that constitutes any individual 
in this class aiid makes it that wliich it is, an 
individual? Could this be detected, dis- 
covered, discerned, disclosed, — what shall I 
say? — envisaged, intuited, we might find in 
it the Principle of Individuation, the individual 
entity. 

But how many principles have we already? 
This too is a point debated among meta- 
physicians. How many entities, realities, are 
there? Entia non stint vmlliplicanda practer 
ncccssitatcniy "There may not be as many 
entities as you suppose"; but what is the 
criterion of necessity? Can an enumeration 
be exhaustive? Cannot one determine in 
advance, deductively, the actual number, or 
approximate to it with some probability? We 
have, I think, five already: The principle of 
existence, the principle of substance, the 
principle of cause, the principle of class, and 
the principle of individuation. Why just five 
principles? Why not more than five? Why 
not fewer? Let us linger a moment and 
inquire how these words and the conceptions 



METAPHYSICS 6/ 

for which they are presumed to stand came 
into our minds. 

As respects the words that denote these 
metaphysical entities, they are plainly taken 
from the names of perceived and experienced 
things. It was of course not possible to take 
any word whatever, but only such as seemed 
to denote something not altogether unlike the 
thing, for thing we must call it, that was to be 
named. All along, however, the protest has 
been uttered that these words were intended 
to stand for something different from that 
which they had previously meant, and the 
warning has been given that the old associa- 
tions must not be permitted to intrude into the 
new sphere. As for the conceptions them- 
selves, if conceptions they may be called, for 
we must call them by some name however 
unfitting, — one story of their origin runs some- 
what as follows: Primitive men were haunted 
by the images of their fellows. The actual 
presence, the remembrances, the shadows of 
their forms, the reflection of them from any 
polished surface, the dreams and the visions — 
what shall I say? — not animated, but "cor- 
porated" everything else. Even now cultured 
people cannot rid themselves of the habit 
of seeing human faces and forms in the 
shapes of clouds and the patterns of Wall- 
paper; even now poets and sculptors and 



68 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

painters hearken back to the old illusion. 
Critics talk of personifications of beauty, 
youth, justice, vice, death, pleasure and the 
rest, without seeming to be aware that these 
words stood originally for persons, and that 
they have not yet become so thoroughly 
depersonified as clearness of thought requires 
that they should become. If it is still thought 
a finer thing to see "the wind's feet glance 
along the sea" than to think the thought of 
sea and air sundered from human elements, — 
a thought to which a few have attained; how 
could the men of earlier time escape this 
obsession of the throng of recollections of 
their man-enviror id life which spread them- 
selves through their world as gods, angels, 
spirits, fairies, devils, goblins, ghosts, material- 
izations and all the fair and ugly humanities of 
old and new religions? As time wears on and 
experience slowly displaces these images from 
one reahn of thought after another and in 
spite of many reversions and back-slidings, a 
new world builds itself up within us; we 
become able to look back over the long proc- 
ess of the gradual obliteration of the old 
conceptions, and to see that the meta- 
physicians without being aware of the fact 
were wrestling in their minds with the dim 
lingering traces of the old concretions that had 
clung necessarily to their ancestors' thoughts. 



METAPHYSICS 69 

It IS a century-long struggle so to revolutionize 
our spirits, that all thine^s shall become new to 
us. Ilunianitas began as a word for that 
which was in man, in men; it stood originally 
for a reality that was corporeal enough, and 
the scholastic battles over Universals, the dis- 
putes of the realists, the conceptualists, the 
nominalists were unavoidable stages in the 
evolution of mankind. Let not anyone flatter 
himself to-day that he has finally emerged 
from this entanglement of ideas. Many of us 
are as deeply involved in it as ever and there 
are some who, in lieu of struggling to extricate 
themselves, resist the efforts of others to 
extricate them. Hegel had not emerged from 
it, nor has Herbert Spencer. The treatment 
of gravitation, heat, light by the former; of 
force, energy by the latter, attest this. The 
biologists have not released themselves from 
the bonds of the past as long as they s(*ek for 
what was called the natural systcMU of classi- 
fication. Those mathematicians have not 
risen above the scholastic point of view who 
still wrangle over their zeros, their infinitesi- 
mals, their negatives, infinites and imaginaries. 
No one of us but is still in bondage if he 
believes in the existence of any one of these 
principles that we have enumerated, if he 
holds that there are any other realities than 
those of common sense or if he ascribes to 



70 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

these more persistence, extent and value than 
the evidence warrants; in short, if he believes 
that a science of metaphysics is possible. 

Now most philosophers are as little content 
with this account of the origin of these ideas 
as they arc with this estimate of their value. 
They are somewhat better satisfied with the 
first description of their nature that I gave in 
trying to make them intelligible to you and 
to myself. In accordance with this, these 
ideas are arrived at by a process of abstraction 
which thinks away what is peculiar to any indi- 
vidual or to any one state of that individual, 
and retains what is common to all. Let me say 
rather, There remains what is common to all 
which is not to be accounted for on any theory 
of the survival in our minds of some residues 
of the irrelevant conceptions of our ancestors. 

What are these principles then for? At this 
point the opinions of metaphysicians are 
divided; but before exhibiting the divisions, I 
must present another mode of deriving these 
principles and also adduce a few more of the 
principles themselves. 

It has been stated (in the lecture on Episte- 
mology) that every inference resembles the rule 
of three, and runs in this way nearly: As a is 
to by so is a to b\ where a is something 
thought to resemble ^, and U is a conception 
which resembles b. In conformity with this 



METAPHYSICS J I 

scheme, one may say: As your idea of the 
elm tree on our corner is to the tree which at 
this moment you do not see, so is the tree as 
you gaze at it to — what? — to a something which 
stands to the tree in the relation that the tree 
stands to your idea of it. Of course the desire 
is to test this inference, to find out whether 
this thing that the tree is said to stand for, to 
represent, is as it is conceived to be. That we 
are unable to do so, is no impugnment of the 
inference; we are as little able to test our 
inferences as to the nature of the interior of 
the earth. There is however no question that 
the center of the earth exists in the same sense 
in which the surface exists; here we are deal- 
ing with the product of a precarious inference 
which is not merely inaccessible to our tests, 
but unamenable to them. 

Out of the multitude of metaphysical 
principles I select one more, which I will try to 
describe. That which thinks, knows and 
feels, it is said, is not itself either thought or 
knowledge or feeling. It is that of which 
these are the acts, the properties, the 
attributes. What is its nature, or as he would 
add, its inmost nature, its essence, is the meta- 
physician's question. He even finds here a 
fourth mode of essaying the problem of his 
science in general. 

Not by the abstraction of perceived qualities, 



72 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

not by the survival through inheritance of the 
residual conceptions of a vanished barbarism, 
not by inference from the extension to another 
realm of the relation between idea and 
percept, were the metaphysician's principles 
attained; but the mind is itself now appre- 
hcndent of its own essence and of these other 
principles; and a knowledge or something 
higher than knowledge is vindicated to man, 
an intuition of realities that are really real, 
that is, are metaphysical realities. Through 
the disguises of appearances, the shows and 
shadows and reflections of things, to the meta- 
physician first and after him to others of man- 
kind belike, stand revealed things as they are 
in their own nature, things in themselves. 
Or, looking not forward, but backward, some 
have maintained that in some prior state of 
existence, those realities were beheld of which 
the things of sense are the transient and 
temporary adumbration. 

Are there any other ways of establishing the 
existence of a reality independent of our con- 
sciousness? Do these ways lead to that? 
And if by these or any other paths the meta- 
physician attains what he seeks, can he tell us 
anything of his quarry? We do not want 
eloquence; we do not want emotions; we do 
not want edicts; we want knowledge, and 
since knowledge is as ambiguous as the word 



METAPHYSICS 73 

dollar unfortunately is, we want knowledge of 
the weight and fineness that was described in 
our epistemology. I do not deny that they 
may have reached something other than that, 
and, that this other may be something better 
than that; but that precisely is what I want of 
them, at least in my present mood. Let us 
hear their statements first. 

These principles are many. They are 
reducible to a few which are absolutely distinct 
from one another. They are reducible to one. 
They are unknowable beyond the mere fact 
that they exist. They are knowable, and 
assertions are possible about them. It is 
matter. It is mind. It is the unity of both. 
It is neither. We may pass over the answers 
that were given before the scientific problem 
was definitely distinguished from the meta- 
physical problem; as, it is water; it is fire; it is 
air; it is spirit. To resume the later answers: 
It is consciousness. It is unconsciousness. It 
is intelligence. It is will. It is imagination. 
It is timeless. It is spaceless. It is God, 
cither invested with all the attributes that the 
popular mythologies ascribe to the object of 
their adoration, or divested of them all. It is 
as independent of God as of man. And then 
follow all the more abstract determinations: 
It is fate. It is power. It is substance. It is 
cause. It is tendency. It is habit. It is 



74 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

distinct from the knowable world. It precedes 
nature. It pervades nature. It follows on 
nature. Then there are the verbal substitu- 
tions that predicate of this **It" words that 
have more show of meaning and a fuller 
sound: It is the Infinite. It is the Absolute. 
It is the Unconditioned. It is the Uncaused. 
It is — but stop! 

Here arises, not only the man of common 
sense, but the man of science-sense, and says: 
You are paying us with words. We grant that 
you are not always aware of it yourself. We 
see into you and through you. You arc lead- 
ing us no-whither. You profess to stand 
among a world of realities; you do stand amid 
the images, the reflections, the shadows, the 
refractions of our worlds. You believe or 
make believe that you arc supporting the 
higher interests of humanity against sloth and 
sensuality, appetite and hate, conceit and 
dearth of ideals. You do this; but it is only a 
part of your influence — you turn the best 
minds away from thinking and doing those 
things on which knowledge, faith, conduct and 
happiness depend. Give me rather the world 
of my boyhood, the world of warmth and 
light, of colors and sounds, of roses and 
cherries, yes, of colic and rhubarb pills than 
the things that are dreamt of in your 
philosophy. Or let me keep the world of my 



METAPHYSICS 75 

maturer age with its air-waves, ether-vibra- 
tions, eddying atoms and molecules, its 
calculus of numbers and vectors, of classes 
and groups, of infinitesimals and infinites: its 
strifes and victories, its failures and defeats 
even, rather than this unimaginable, incon- 
ceivable, unverified and unverifiable hypo- 
thetical world of yours. We are amazed that 
you seek God and souls in that inane, or call it 
after your fashion, The Inane, though I am 
unable to pronounce the initials as capitals. 

But a voice from another quarter is heard, — 
dreaded alike by the metaphysician, the 
scientist and the way-faring man. You might 
call it the utterance of a **State Board of 
Arbitration." Really, the decencies and 
proprieties must be observed. Let us be 
courteous. You are hypothesis-makers all of 
you; and hypothesis for hypothesis, the meta- 
physician's seems to us others to be eminently 
desirable for the promotion of utility, nobility, 
beauty and sanctity, for the preservation of 
Church and State, for the continuance of our 
administration of them, in a realm where men 
must believe that you are standing on the 
bed-rock, whether you are or not, and they 
will believe it all the more readily if they can- 
not comprehend the arguments by which you 
claim to support it. 

Now there are candid souls that abhor this 



^6 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

duplicity as it seems to them to be. To some 
these metaphysical conceptions are realities, 
and they refuse to call them hypotheses. To 
others these conceptions are hypotheses 
indeed, but illegitimate ones, and by no means 
conducive to human welfare in any respect, 
least of all in contributing to keep a certain 
eminent statesman in office. Nothing can be 
done with them, nothing can be made of 
them; nothing can be inferred from them. 
The sooner humanity leaves them behind, 
the better; renounces too its notion that these 
thoughts are high and exalted, that they are 
God and Immortality, that they lead to God 
and Immortality, that they are any nearer to 
them than the mud at our feet. The constitu- 
tion of mud, its causes and conditions, its 
effects, what can be inferred from mud and 
from what mud can be inferred, the feelings, 
beliefs, purposes and intentions of men in 
regard to it, — these can be ascertained, known; 
and this is the only knowledge we need or 
can use. There is no principle nor reality of 
mud apart from these. Existence means the 
known and the knowable. An unknowable 
existence as something different from the 
known and the knowable, is a contradiction. 
Non-existences are neither known nor know- 
able; and there is no desire to know them. 
An unknowable existence is simply an 



METAPHYSICS Tf 

existence that is not directly presented or that 
we have no data for ascertaining the nature of; 
not something different in nature from the 
known and the knowable. Knowledges are 
psychical states; but what is mud? Mud is 
something known or knowable. Would there 
be no mud, if there had been no consciousness? 
We have no data for answering this question. 
Consciousness is as much as mud is. Both 
are existences; and the question can be 
answered when we are in a condition to 
answer this other question: Would there not 
be three-eighths- of existence, if the other five- 
eighths had not been? Perceived mud, re- 
membered mud, foreseen mud, imagined mud, 
desired mud, hated mud, — these exist, and 
resemble one another in certain aspects; but 
a mud which is not one of these or like one of 
these does not exist. A principle of mud, the 
reality of mud, a mud out of all relation to 
me, I neither know nor desire to know. If 
anyone asserts an existence of a perceived 
chair where there is no one to perceive it, I 
can attach no meaning to his assertion. If he 
says that it is always perceived when I do not 
perceive it by some being whom he may, if 
he please, identify with his God, I have not 
his insight nor evidence. If he says that there 
is then an unknown something there, I say, it 
is surely unknown to me; and as he declares 



78 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

that it IS unknown to him, we cannot talk 
about it, particularly if he too identifies it in 
part at least with his God. "Well, don't you 
at any rate believe that it exists?" I reply, 
*'To exist means to me to be known or like 
the known." If you mean differently, I do not 
begrudge you the satisfaction of ruminating on 
you know not what; though I will listen to you 
when you go on to say: '^/Jas Sc/n is/ jV/c/i/s^ 
(Pure Being is Nothing); but in positing itself, 
nothing necessarily posits the possibility of its 
negation, but the negation of nothing is some- 
thing, and indeed something in its nakedness, 
something as yet undetermined, unlimited, 
the nascency of existence, related to the pre- 
vious (not antecedent in time, note, for as yet 
time is not) state of nothing through the 
intermediation of the Becoming ({/as JVcrdcn) 
and, as all philosophers know, the continued 
application of the dialectic proeess will at 
length establish the existence of mud." I 
listen, I say, because you finally arrive at a 
point where you say something about the 
world in which I live that no one else has 
noted. 

I have purposely avoided all mention of 
materialism, idealism, monism, identism, 
nihilism, realism, and the many other names 
by which the theories of metaphysicians are 
called. These names originated at a time 



METAPHYSICS 79 

when the sciences, particularly psychology, 
had not attained the development which they 
have at present. They have been taught to 
those who did not know the conditions under 
which they were first introduced. They have 
been repeated in such vague groupings of 
words that they convey no precise meaning 
even to those familiar with these speculations. 
Their meaning can be acquired only by living 
in imagination through the state of thought 
they represent. And many both within and 
without that sacred confine subscribe to the 
Frenchman's definition of Metaphysics: L\xrt 
dc Si^garcr avcc nidtliodc; or, La science des c /loses 
incoujiues. 

But the situation seems to me to be this: 
Many years, perhaps centuries, must pass, 
many sciences be perfected of which we dis- 
cern merely the intimations, many things that 
we wish now must have ceased to be of con- 
cern to us, the knowledge of many facts of 
mind and language, now restricted to a few, 
must become the possession of the people; 
before we have even the foundation laid of 
the superstructure which some fancy that they 
have built already; and yet it is only by the 
downfall of their towers that we can learn 
where the foundation needed strengthening. 
All honor then to those who have tried and 
who have failed. 



Logic 



ABOUT THINGS AS RELATED 



LOGIC 

ABOUT THINGS AS RLLATED 

"The Highlanders," said Dr. Johnson, "are 
not much accustomed to be interrogated by 
others, and seem never to have thought upon 
interrogating themselves; so that, if they do 
not know what they tell to be true, they like- 
wise do not distinctly perceive it to be false/* 
No one has ever thought of interrogating him- 
self before he hasbeen interrogated by others. 
Then he begins to discern the necessity of 
being prepared for the next interview. He 
might prefer to kill the troublesome ques- 
tioner; but failing that alternative, he must 
answer him. To converse loitli ones self is a 
Greek phrase for thinking. There are very 
few to-day that have emerged from the con- 
dition of thinking conversationally, that is, as 
if others were present. Knowledge is, as I 
hope we see, a social product. Knowledge 
implies thinking; thinking involves self-ques- 
tioning; and this results from being interro- 
gated by others. This in turn is not possible 
without language, without society. 

A community that talks matters over, 
debates, discusses, disputes, may come to per- 

83 



84 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

ceive that the discussions sometimes result in 
a convincement, sometimes not; learns at 
length that there is a right way and a wrong 
way, that certain rules must be followed or no 
progress can be made. Out of such conditions 
as these arose logic. In its origin it was a 
body of rules which must be observed by all 
disputants who wish other than a merely 
verbal agreement. From the places where 
men met together these rules were carried to 
the retirement of groves, caves and halls by 
those given to solitary musings, and were 
found necessary in the conduct of that self- 
converse to which they were devoted. In time 
these rules came to be regarded as laws of 
thinking by some that believed a profounder 
view was needed. We find them appearing 
later as laws of the product of thinking. They 
appear again under a slightly different aspect 
as conditions to which the objects of thought 
must conform. They are viewed later as laws 
of phenomena, that is, as facts of the world 
we live in; general aspects which things as we 
know them present. But this was not enough, 
and some philosophers have maintained that 
whatever might have been the origin, the pur- 
pose, the applications, the transformations of 
these precious discoveries, they are metaphys- 
ical truths, laws of a Universe .absolutely inde- 
pendent of all human volition and cognition. 



LOGIC 8$ 

Not only have such controversies raged in 
regard to the nature of these — what shall I 
call them? — principles, but these principles 
themselves have been derided and rejected as 
frivolous subtilities unworthy the attention of 
any sensible man. Others have seized the 
name lo^ic and applied it at one time to 
theological mysteries, to metaphysical specula- 
tions, to scientific procedures and to psycho- 
logical processes. But the confusion which is 
the inevitable accom.paniment of the origin 
and growth of ideas appears to be giving place 
to or(' r and system, to the organization of 
great sciences. In the realm of thought into 
which few penetrate there arc revolutions and 
developments that are the conditions, the 
parallels, the consequences of those great 
changes which manifest themselves to the 
eyes of all, the vast industrial and commercial 
equipments of modern times. The part of 
Logic that dealt with language has been 
handed over to grammar, rhetoric, linguistics, 
philology. Another, dealing with a peculiar 
class of relations which much vexed the old 
logicians, has passed under the domain of the 
Calculus of Probabilities, a branch of mathe- 
matics of singular refinement and delicacy, 
and of extreme importance in statistical 
investigations. Still another portion, the very 
nucleus of the Aristotelian logic, has rounded 



S6 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

out to a symmetrical whole they saw not when 
they moved therein, has been furnished with a 
system of signs, borrowed indeed from 
ordinary algebra, in order that skill acquired 
in the manipulation of algebraic formulas 
may be utilized in the new province, but 
having in reality as little to do with algebra 
as the keyboard of a typewriter has to do with 
the keyboard of a piano. This is called by 
some the Exact Logic and Symbolic Logic; 
and is made up of several related disciplines; 
as, the calculus of classes as having some, or 
all, or no members in common, the calculus 
of relations as existing or not existing, and 
the calculus of relatives. I am going to give 
you some description of this nucleus, as I 
have termed it, of the Aristotelian logic; and 
contrast the ancient and the modern methods 
of treatment. This contrast is very significant, 
and shows that one of the triumphs of modern 
culture is the emancipation of the mind from 
the tyranny of language. 

My first aim is to show what the subject- 
matter of the exact logic is. My next 
endeavor will be to show wherein it differs 
from the subject-matter of the old logic, as 
that subject-matter really was; and to contrast 
this with what it was supposed to be. In the 
third place, the admirable notation of the 
modern science which lends itself so readily to 



LOGIC 87 

purposes of calculation is to be contrasted with 
the clumsy unmanageableness of the former 
modes of expression. 

Where now do we find the things with which 
our science deals? Objects there are, castles, 
toads, fears, loves, oceans, shovels, planets, 
angels, pebbles, fairies — why, if I could call 
over the names of all the languages in the 
world, there would still remain just as many 
objects unenumerated as when I first began. 
Again there are among these objects rela- 
tions. You cannot think a relation without 
thinking at least two objects. You cannot think 
of any two objects without discerning one or 
more relations between them. You may never 
have thought of it before perhaps, but it is also 
true that you never have thought without it. 

Objects are groupablc into classes. All the 
objects that agree in the fact that each pos- 
sesses certain specified attributes are one 
class; those objects that possess another set 
of attributes are another class. Now the 
logician would fain deal with such classes and 
all the relations among them, but nature is 
too intricate for him; and he is compelled to 
do what all scientists are driven to do, each in 
his own province, to abandon the complexity 
of nature and to substitute some simpler 
contrivance of his own. Nature's objects 
change unceasingly, are constantly acquiring 



88 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

and losing attributes, and altering their inten- 
sities or degrees. The artificial nature which 
the logician puts in the place of the real 
nature behaves quite otherwise. Indeed a set 
of chalk-lines on a black-board, each carrying 
some letter of the alphabet, will amply suffice 
for our present purpose. A line is our object 
and the letters on the line are the qualities of 
that object. A set of lines is called a universe — 
a grand name for so slight a thing. Some of 
these lines are ^'s or all are or none are; some 
are //s perhaps and all arc cs and none are 
^'s and so on. The question now is what are 
the different relations that are found to exist 
between any two classes, as the ^2:'s and ^'s for 
instance? i. In our first universe all the a are 
d and all the d are a, 2. In the second all the 
a are /;, but some of the 6 are not a, 3. In 
this third universe some of the a are not d, but 
all of the d are a. 4. See in our fourth uni- 
verse some a are 6 and some are not, and 
some 6 are a and some are not. 5. Lastly, we 
have a universe in which none of the a are d 
and none of the d are a. 

These were the only classes and relation of 
classes that the old logic occupied itself with 
for ages; and the only problem to which it 
gave a solution at all approaching complete- 
ness was: Given the relations of two classes 
to a third, required to determine their relation 



LOGIC 89 

to each other. But we should be doing them 
a great injustice if we suppose that the problem 
could possibly have presented itself to them 
in any such simple guise as that in which I 
have exhibited it to you. Their thoughts were 
not shallow; they were confused. Perhaps 
'*there*burned' a truer light of God in them . . . 
than goes on to prompt this low-pulsed, forth- 
right, craftsman's 'brain' of mine." They ap- 
proached the subject entangled in the meshes 
of language, and of one language at that. But 
it was not merely the misleading associations 
of language and the ambiguities of expression 
that they had to contend with; there were 
connections of thought which no force of 
genius, nothing but long experience of a 
variety of relations could break up. Even 
now there prevails among the logicians of the 
old school a natural enough inability to com- 
prehend what it is that the exact logicians are 
aiming at. The logician was a rhetorician in 
disguise; he still retained, often without know- 
ing it, traces of his previous condition. In 
theology, in law, in the schools, in contro- 
versies, every contestant sought to win the 
victory by sliowing that his contention was 
necessarily implied in some admission of his 
adversary. The question which science raises: 
How can the prevalence of that admission be 
tested, has given rise to another science, the 



90 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

science of "inductive logic/' with which we 
have no present concern. Nor would I call 
this exact logic of ours deductive logic, though 
they are frequently and, as I think, mistakenly 
identified. It is merely an application of 
induction and deduction to the ascertainment 
of the class-relations that certain class-rela- 
tions imply. We study the properties of these 
universes, as I have called them, just as the 
naturalist studies an oyster. The science of 
these universes is as little or as much inductive 
or deductive logic as is the science of oysters. 
But let us survey some aspects of the old 
logic. There are three so-called laws about 
which much ado has been made: the law of 
identity, the law of contradiction, and the law 
of the excluded middle. The first is simply the 
requirement that when you have specified 
what lines of your universe you will call ^, you 
must keep calling them a to the end of the 
chapter, and what lines you have called not-rt: 
you must go on calling not-^. The second 
merely says that the ^-lines must not be called 
not-rt', and the not-^ must not be called a- 
lines. The third is only the injunction that 
you must say of any line in that universe: it is 
either an a or it is not. Important enough 
are these rules indeed when we are engaged 
in controversy or thinking by ourselves in the 
seclusion of our studies or pursuing in a 



LOGIC 91 

laboratory some scientific investigation; and 
the violation of them entails pretty serious 
consequences, whether the disregard of them 
is intentional or unintentional; but why should 
we logicians exalt our province and magnify 
our function, insisting that not only our fellow 
men but all nature is subject to these regula- 
tions; and not the nature alone which we 
know, but the nature none but metaphysicians 
claim to know, the Absolute, the Real, the 
Existentially Existent? The ^-'s of nature 
manifest no such fixity. The apple which a 
moment ago you regarded as not ripe has 
become ripe, — at what instant? Evolutionism, 
whether that of a Spencer or a Hegel, is in 
one aspect a protest against the notion that 
muscles and sensations behave as we agree to 
play that the lines behave which we draw for 
our universe. So much for the laws of 
thought; they have a simple expression in 
the formulas of the exact logic. With their 
purport to others, if we are mistaken about it, 
we really do not need to concern ourselves at 
all; and wc may safely leave the more pro- 
found meanings which it would be foolish to 
deny that they may have to the devotees of 
other sciences, or nesciences. 

I pass to another feature of the old logic, — 
the syllogism. Here is a specimen of that 
curious product of human ingenuity: 



92 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES . 

1. "Babies are illogical. 

2. Illogical persons are despised. 

3. Babies are despised." 

It consists of three artifices called proposi- 
tions. The schools maintained that any sen- 
tence could be transformed to propositions. 
Propositions were built up of all and somCy is, 
and arc, no and noiy a, b, r, d, and so forth. 
There were four types of propositions: 

A. All a areTr. 

I. Some r/are //. 

E. No V are ;;/. 

O. Some g[ are not /. 

There are, you see, two letters in each 
proposition. The former is named the sub- 
ject; the latter, the predicate. The syllogism 
with which the logicians actually dealt appears 
in the following form: 

Some X are not ;;/. 

Noy are m. 

All X arejv 

Two of the propositions have one letter in 
common, and are the premises. There are 
three letters in all; and the proposition which 
contains the two remaining letters is the con- 
clusion. Its subject is the minor term; its 
predicate the major term. A premise is major 
or minor, as it contains the major or the minor 
term. 

Of the four types of propositions and three 



LOGIC 93 

letters 512 distinct syllogisms can be made. 
These are divided into valid and invalid. If 
the premises involve the conclusion, the syllo- 
gism is valid; otherwise, invalid. The valid 
syllogisms are 24. The elaborate rules for 
constructing, for transforming, for testing syl- 
logisms interest very few. They have now 
been all superseded by the brilliant discovery 
of Mrs. Ladd-Franklin of Baltimore, who has 
succeeded in replacing them all by a simple 
test and expressing it, together with all the 
varieties of mode and figure, so called, in a 
single, simple formula of the exact logic. 
This formula, {ax=zo) {6x=o) (a6±o)=zOt is of 
course meaningless to one who has not studied 
the symbolic logic, but even children have 
been shown how completely and triumphantly 
it solves the one great problem of the old 
logic. 

How has this triumph of the new logic been 
brought about? Here is an enumeration of 
some of the circumstances that have led to 
this result: Logicians withdrew their atten- 
tion from language, from its sentences and 
words; they ceased to let themselves remain 
involved in all the complexities of psychical 
processes; they saw amid the mass of material 
that embarrassed the old logicians a definite 
structure which only required to be freed from 
the foreign conceptions obscuring its propor- 



94 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

tions to be recognized as the nucleus and germ 
of logic, if not logic itself; they had seen num- 
bers and their relations, lines and their group- 
ings represented by symbols in such a way 
that the symbols took the place of the num- 
bers and lines in thought and bore the mind 
along to results that without the symbols it 
never would have attained; they had seen the 
vast sciences of botany, zoology, astronomy, 
geology bud and blossom, grow and fruit, 
unassisted by any of the artifices of the old 
logic, and all these reflections have set them 
to distill the soul of usefulness out of things 
idle. From the lumber-room and dust-heap 
where the out-worn philosophies have been 
flung by the pride of science there has been 
rescued this fair garment that science herself 
may wear unto her latest day with profit and 
honor. 

I want to show you what the exact logic 
proposed to do and has done. I had said that 
the efforts of the old logic culminated in the 
solution of the problem of three classes, and 
that the new logic had taken that solution and 
all its numerous rules and had reduced them 
to a single formula. From this achievement 
it advances to fresh conquests. It attacks the 
problem of an unlimited number of classes. 
It says, give me any combination of tlic five 
fundamental relations among any number of 



LOGIC 95 

classes, and I will tell you the whole of the 
class-relations that the former imply. It goes 
even further than this and brings into its pur- 
view many relations which the school logic 
had overlooked. We must admit that it does 
not get outside of classes and that it does not 
deal with all the relations of classes, but only 
with the inclusion, the exclusion and the over- 
lapping of classes; but its sCope is again 
widened by the fact that many relations are 
so associated with class-relations that the con- 
sideration of the one may be substituted for 
that of the other,, and the conclusion when 
obtained can be translated out of the class- 
relations to which the calculation has led us 
back into the other relations desired. A sim- 
ple illustration will make this plain. We say 
oranges are yellow; and the oranges are the 
only class we have before our mind. We 
seem to see the yellow oranges as we have 
actually seen them many times. Where then 
is the other class to come from? We form the 
class of yellow things which we were not 
thinking of before perhaps, and say oranges 
are yellow things; thus substituting for the 
relation between thing and attribute the rela- 
tion between two classes. Even such a state- 
ment as **That story of yours about your once 
meeting the sea-serpent always sets me off 
yawning," can be brought under the class-rela- 



96 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

tion point of view. The arj^ument of the old 
logicians was: Everything can be expressed 
in sentences. Any sentence can be reduced 
to propositions. All that is implied in a prop- 
osition or combination of propositions can be 
determined by the use of syllogisms. Now no 
one of these assertions is true. It is not true 
that everything can be expressed in words. 
It is not true that every sentence can be 
reduced to propositions. It is not true that 
all the implications even of a proposition can 
be elicited by any logic or indeed by any 
method whatsoever: and all that the syllo- 
gistic ascertained in its laborious fashion was 
some, not all, of the merely class-relations 
involved. How then did it come to pass that 
logic was hailed as the science of sciences, the 
queen of the sciences? that it was regarded as 
the foundation of all knowledge? that thou- 
sands of eager, earnest students flocked to 
hear the doctrines of the great masters of the 
art in the Middle Ages? that Europe echoed 
with the names of Peter Lombard, Bernard 
of Clairvaux, Hugo St. Victor, William of 
Couches, Adelard of Bath, Joscelyn of Sois- 
sons, Abclard and the thousand other names 
of men who were striving to lead themselves 
and their fellows out of ignorance and error? 
How could it be otherwise when all knowledge 
and especially the highest knowledge was 



LOGIC 97 

believed to be derivable solely from groups of 
words which had been handed down from the 
past. It is riot strange that men should have 
sought some science of this description, should 
imagine that it was attainable and even fancy 
that it had been attained. It was by no means 
what they had supposed it to be, and the 
moderns have decried its claims without 
taking the trouble to understand the reasons 
for rejecting them. But it has accomplished 
a wonderful work in the world. I speak not 
of the controversies it has aroused and pro- 
voked to solutions; I speak rather of its great 
achievement in taking Romans, Goths and 
Britons, of the type of Dr. Johnson's High- 
lander, and making them recognize the neces- 
sity of being interrogated and of interrogating 
themselves by definite methods. Such nascent 
intelligences exist to-day even in highly civil- 
ized countries, and to these the knowledge of 
the old logic would be useful, even necessary, 
as a stepping-stone to higher things; though 
niggling may be the only word that the mod- 
ern investigator would apply to its trivial dis- 
tinctions and elaborate rules. 

Over against the magnificent claims which 
the old logic made set the humble attitude of 
the new logic. Contrast the mighty interest 
among the devotees of the ancient doctrine 
with the few and rare cultivators of the 



98 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

modern science. The student of the exact or 
the symbolic logic, of the writings of Peirce, 
Schroeder, McColl, Johnson, Venn, and of na- 
ture itself, is disposed to underrate rather than 
overstate the importance of his researches. 
This is about all he claims: There are some 
phenomena which are not themselves classes 
or class-relations, but which are so connected 
with them that any discovery in the one field 
can be interpreted in terms of the other. 
Moreover, classes and their relations have 
been made to coexist with a set of symbols in 
such a manner that reasoning about the sym- 
bols takes the place of reasonings about the 
things signified by them; that is, a process 
which can be performed in all cases takes the 
place of a process that can be performed in 
the fewest instances. 

Here is an easy problem for the exact logic: 
The annelidx (a) are soft-bodied animals 
{s), and either naked {n) or enclosed (/) in a 
tube. Moreover, the order of the annelidoc 
consists of all invertebrate animals (/) which 
have red blood (r). 

Here are six classes. Add to these the 
classes which can be made by putting together 
two or more of these. Add further the classes 
that can be made by taking the individuals 
common to any two, or to any more than two 
of these. Add the classes that are left when 



LOGIC 99 

each of the preceding is taken out of the uni- 
verse. Add the classes that can be made by 
combinations and selections among all the 
above classes. 

The exact logician will readily tell you what 
relation (logical only) exists between any two 
of these classes, under the conditions implied 
in the above statement. 

Contrast with this the work of the logician 
of the brave old days of yore. Though he 
was really doing little more than studying the 
relations of classes, he fancied that he was 
studying the laws of thought, the principles of 
existence, the art of arts, the science of sci- 
ences, and so on. He had no notation and so 
was obliged to look at his problems and to 
work them in the medium of ordinary lan- 
guage with all its imperfections. He attacked 
mainly problems that involved but three 
classes, and even these in a partial and unsci- 
entific way, by means of a host of special 
rules, which were very ingenious, it is true, and 
calculated to sharpen the wits, but likely to 
divert the mind from nature and the infinite 
number there of classes and properties to be 
studied. What a small part of the properties 
of the hydrocarbons would their logical prop- 
erties appear to any chemist! 

Here is a sample of a problem in the syllo- 
gistic logic, which I take from the logical pro- 



ICX) SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

ductions of the author oi Alice in Wonderland: 
**Some epicures are ungenerous. All my 
uncles are generous. What relation exists 
between epicures and my uncles?" 

Notice that it is only a logical relation that 
is asked for. My uncles may hate epicures; 
but the inclusions and exclusions of logic 
involve no emotions, or treat them like .r's 
andj'^s. 

The answer is left to you to discover by the 
rules either of the old logic or of the new, or 
by your own unaided intelligence, that is, your 
mother-wit. One never hears of father-wit, 
unless perhaps it be this unfortunate business 
of logic. 



A Universe of Hegel 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL 

Darkness and light, and the dawn and twi- 
light that span the chasms between — how 
many consciousnesses of these successions and 
these recurrences there have been on earth 
that did not go beyond these phenomena 
themselves, or associated them with the 
revisiting promptings of hunger and sleep 
merely, or it may be with sensations of 
warmth or cold! What do swimming, creep- 
ing and flying things know of a ball of fire 
that climbs the sky from that quarter and goes 
down again to the horizon over yonder? It 
must have been a long time before men found 
out whether the yellow globe brought the 
light or the light brought the yellow globe. 
Early man's ignorance of what we think is 
exceeded only by our ignorance of what he 
thought. Very few indeed are called to refeel 
the feelings that preceded speech; and of 
these fewer still are chosen; and these even 
come back and cannot tell the world. For the 
words and phrases of civilized man stand for 
grown thoughts and not for thoughts that were 
ere thought was born. It is a puzzle how men 

ever ascertained that it was the same globe of 

103 



104 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

fire that passed overhead day after day. They 
must have believed this for a long time before 
there was any reason that justified them in 
doing so. You have no time to do what seems 
so much like mere dreaming and musing; and 
that is, to remove one after another the 
acquired beliefs and habits of your mind, and 
put yourself back to barbarism or childhood 
again, to savagery or infancy, to the life of 
fowl and brute. Absurd and baseless fictions 
of the diseased imaginations of the degenerate 
men of our epoch that can pretend that our 
thoughts have any relation with the vague 
thinking of birds and beasts! Light, twilight, 
darkness may be replaced by the conceptions 
of sun-presence, sun-absence, sun-disappear- 
ance; but what connection have these with the 
vision of the resting sun and the revolving 
earth? There cannot be many whose minds 
are set to this tune, the foundation of whose 
thought is the habitual recognition that *'swift 
with wondrous swiftness fleeting, the pomp of 
earth whirls round and round; the glow of 
Eden alternating with shuddering midnight's 
gloom profound." 

But there is another cycle, the long cold and 

£> the long heat, the summer and the winter. 

You hardly deem it worth while to think of 

them in these terms only, and leaving sky, 

earth and sea out of your consciousness, 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL 105 

remember and foresee nothing but alterna- 
tions of heat and cold. You see no use in 
doing this, no result that can come from 
breaking up the whole of consciousness into 
parts or phases, to study or describe one of 
these isolated from the rest. Well, if you 
have not done this, if you will not or cannot 
do it, you will never know what philosophy is, 
or what science even is, though you should 
read all the books of all the philosophers 
that have ever written. This reciprocation of 
hot and cold weather you associate with the 
alternate northinij^s and southings of the sun; 
but you do not connect them as Herodotus 
did, who thought that the sun was driven 
southward by the cold and carried with it the 
water which it had drawn up from the sea. 
But again there is substituted for all this that 
we can see, and any child might see, might 
even discover for himself, something no one 
ever saw or ever can see, a conception so 
different from the world of our sensations and 
perceptions, however sublimated, that the con- 
necting links, if connecting links there are, 
between this conception and our ordinary per- 
ceptions are utterly unknown to thousands 
that entertain both — the conception namely, 
of an earth that no one can ever behold 
revolving about a massive globe millions of 
miles away, so as to bring this globe, this new 



I06 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

sun which we have substituted for our old sun, 
in alternate half-years now over the northern 
and now over the southern hemisphere. 
Astronomers and teachers of astronomy are 
not always aware that there is any difficulty, 
not always sure where the difficulty is. Let 
me put the question in this way: The half- 
million-miles-diametered, ninety-million-miles- 
distant globe of the astronomer's conception — 
the little red and yellow ball that dazzles the 
eyes of us all— what has the former of these to 
do with the latter? From the latter and vari- 
ous other indications, the former has been 
inferred. It has been built up in the mind of 
one man after another, sometimes in one way, 
sometimes in another way — sometimes by a 
process which discloses that the new is con- 
natural with the old, sometimes by a process 
which makes the believer in the astronomer's 
sun fancy that it is more real than the percep- 
tion from which it was derived. But the per- 
ceived sun, when actually perceived and not 
merely beheld in imagination, in memory, in 
foresight, in dreams, in hallucinations— even 
this perception itself is an inference, or is in- 
ference-like; has grown up in our minds by 
inference-processes in a manner which '*a few 
discern, and the rest, they may live and learn." 
The transition from day to night or from 
summer to winter takes place during our life- 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL lO/ 

time, seems in consequence to be more within 
the range of the individual's experience, and 
not so indisputably inference as the next 
grand alternation to which I shall ask your 
attention. Our race had forgotten all about 
it; forgotten that it had ever had any such 
experience. Surely no one individual of that 
remote time ever did have the world-experi- 
ence which we remember now; his world was 
bounded by the hills that shut in his valley. 
We do not say that we remember when the 
northern hemisphere was covered with ice 
thousands of feet thick, and the southern pole 
was tropically hot; and back farther still, when 
all this was completely reversed, and the 
north pole was a garden and the southern 
hemisphere one mass of ice; and still farther 
back to the time when the conditions were as 
they are now. We had long forgotten these 
occurrences as well as the vast duration of the 
transition from one of these states to another. 
But now one thing after another has recalled 
(observe the word), recalled them all to our 
minds. Surely that cannot be recalled which 
was never experienced; and surely too the 
sneaking, cowering cave-dweller that was 
frozen up in his dismal lair never experienced 
this. Where was the mind then that recol- 
lects these things to-day? — that remembers 
how for thousands of years the earth's orbit 



108 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

was becoming more and more elongated, how 
the north pole happened to be turned away 
from the sun just when the earth was farthest 
from the sun, how the winter in the northern 
hemisphere exceeded the summer by some 
thirty days for year after year, till those not 
gifted with astronomical minds at that time 
must have thought that it always was thus and 
thus it always would be? You and I did not 
live then to console that ignorant folk by tell- 
ing them that matters would speedily mend, 
that in 20,000 years or so all would be 
reversed. 

This recurrence of glacial epochs, this suc- 
cession of ice-ages and steam-ages, is a 
grander cycle than that of summer and winter, 
and dwarfs the sequence of day and night, but 
it shrinks into insignificance in comparison 
with those stupendous transformations of the 
Universe when there was no human life. 
Whence did we get this conception? the con- 
ception, that is, of a mass immensely larger 
than the astronomer's sun, including indeed 
in itself sun, planets and satellites, all sublimed 
to a tenuous vapor, formless, vast, but sure 
through stage after stage to eventuate in the 
solar system of our astronomers, and equally 
sure to resume its ancient solitary reign 
through the collapse of that very solar system 
itsejf? 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL IO9 

We have passed long since the bounds of 
scientific knowledge, of anything that merits 
the name of knowledge indeed, as the **epi- 
stemologist" understands knowledge; and yet 
all this infinite dilation and contraction of 
worlds on worlds through countless a^ons 
humbles itself before the religious conscious- 
ness, which, amid all these, before all these, 
after all these, pervading, following, preceding 
all these changes, *'faiths" the somewhat, the 
unnamed and unnamable, the unthought and 
unthinkable, the unknown and unknowable — 
this somewhat which profane men have sought 
to comprehend by likening it to love, imagina- 
tion, reason, will, "unconsciousness, nothing, 
and many things else; which foolish men 
have named and at the same time declared 
that the name did not mean what one could 
suppose it to mean; this somewhat which holy 
men have deemed like the god of the Hindu 
or Arabic consciousness; this somewhat on 
which, as on a majestic scroll, men have pro- 
jected religions, philosophies, sciences, fancies 
innumerable, Copernican and Newtonian 
dreams, even now fading away; this somewhat 
would seem to be that whereof no account can 
be given after all, no story told. We are still 
asking questions about it, even while hesita- 
ting to apply the noun "it" to what is so unlike 
any other it that we know. Does it have only 



no SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

a subjective existence? that is, exist only in 
some minds? Or does it have a metaphysical 
existence,--that is, exist independently of any 
mind? Is it, even when naught else is? And 
how are other things related to it? 

These are certainly questions that men may 
entertain, or dismiss as insoluble or useless or 
fantastic. Day and night may roll their 
courses; summer and winter burst and close; 
ice-ages interchange with warmth-ages; 
vapors condense into worlds, and worlds be 
dissipated to vapor; god exist before, amid, 
through, after all, though space and time 
themselves lack the infinity or eternity that we 
ascribe to them;— or again in terms of con- 
sciousness, sensations may merge into percep- 
tions; perceptions be replaced by conceptions, 
the frame-work of common knowledge; science 
outgrow common knowledge; religion absorb 
all these into itself — but will you deny that 
even this maybe transcended; that here and 
there (I really mean not here nor there, but in 
some favored region and era) there may arise 
the philosophical consciousness that shall 
rend the bonds of the senses and the under- 
standing, leap the barriers of reason and 
faith, and attain the universe and god, all 
existences and all possibilities of existence? 

You refuse credence to such claims? And 
yet you, geologist or astronomer, claim to 



■I WI». ■ ^ ^ JI ■ W"» ■ P^!« ' JIM.lW«l■ ' ' ^ W l | !' l ' 'l ^ JI^',fllWW» ' W^ ' ^ ^ j' ! ^^ ■ - ■ -^y'■»JJ ' '^^W^^*H 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL III 

know what happened millions of leagues away 
and millions of winters ago. You, the political 
economist, claim to know what cannot be 
expressed in ordinary language, not indeed in 
language at all except the condensed and 
symbolic language of the generalized algebra. 
You do not expect that the possessor of this 
philosophical consciousness can transport you 
at once to the height that he has attained by 
the toil of years. Royal roads may be built 
to the summits of lofty mountains. There 
are even royal roads to certain geometrical 
truths that the tutors of princes have been 
constrained to discover. But he must not 
commence king who attends this insight. 
Vigils and fasts, penances and prayers must 
lift you to where 

**About him all the sanctities of heaven 
Stood thick as stars, and from his sight received 
Beatitudes past utterance." 

The vision and the faculty divine are prom- 
ised only to those who are born to them; you 
must not only have been born to this philoso- 
phy, but you must have familiarized yourself 
with the languages, some half dozen, in which 
the seekers after these truths have involved 
their half-discovered mysteries; you must 
have followed with eye and ear and mind the 
speculations of the ages; you must have espe- 



112 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

cially considered what took place in Germany 
some hundred years ago, when Kant's irre- 
fragable demonstration of the impossibility of 
metaphysics was followed by the assertion of 
Fichte that he willed the actuality of its 
object; of Schelling that he beheld that actu- 
ality; of Hegel that he was that actuality and 
was possessed of the demonstration of that 
which in others had been mere volitions and 
contemplations. 

Mere was nothing that claimed to be so 
plain that a wayfaring man need not err 
therein. Here was nothing that was con- 
cealed from the wise and prudent and revealed 
to babes. Here was nothing that some semi- 
god, not to be educated by rules and tutors, 
some musical, tremulous, impressional being, 
shall have for the asking and gain with a 
glance. Here is something that you can get, 
if you get at all, only as you get geometry or 
chemistry or art; and we know how very few 
get these. Here is something which does not 
content itself with pagans in praise of the 
knowledge it has won, while it refrains from 
stating a single proposition of its profound, 
but occult lore. Here is something which is 
spread out in thousands of statements, stretch- 
ing through a dozen volumes; axioms, theo- 
rems, chains of reasoning — all the diversity 
and detail that would characterize a treatise 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL II3 

on electricity. You do not suppose that ohms 
and farads stand for nothing because you do 
not know what they stand for. You may 
detect many false statements, many false con- 
ceptions of things that had long been known 
or that have been learned since. One may 
have discovered how to make a correct chart 
without being able to guarantee that the 
chart he has made is correct. You may wish 
for examples or ilhistrations of these asser- 
tions about being, existence, reality and 
appearance; but you must learn that the 
abstract can get along without the concrete as 
well as, perhaps better than, the concrete can 
do without the abstract. You may not know 
German; and if you do, you may get little 
help from that. If you have read other phi- 
losophies you cannot be certain that you will 
understand these of Hegel, and what if you 
should get to know his meaning? Why, it 
would change you, your entire conception of 
the scheme of things, your whole theory of 
conduct, if not the actual course of your own 
conduct, your relation to life and art, your 
notion of the things around you. There are 
no two greater puzzles to each other than the 
philosophical and the non-philosophical head. 
As is likely, you do not wish your view of 
things to be changed. You need fear no ill 
results. The change must be very slow, and 



114 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

perhaps may never take place in your case, 
wish it as much as you may. 

But let us draw nearer to the world accord- 
ing to Hegel. The term negation is used in 
connection with language. Are you familiar 
with it as the name for a process of thought? 
Few have thought of it as a name for a proc- 
ess in things; still less as the name of a meta- 
physical process. Now this process is based 
on what there is already in store at the time 
of its occurrence; there is no need for its 
performance to gather materials from any 
extraneous source. But, it is maintained, 
every position necessarily implies its negation, 
and now emerges this negation, not merely as 
a logical consequence, not only as a physical 
effect, not solely as a motived act, though it 
may be all or each of these; but primarily as 
a metaphysical necessity, an inevitable step in 
the world process, whether in the stellar uni- 
verse or in the decaying vegetable. Note 
again that, if you call what exists at any given 
moment one thing, upon the emergence of its 
negation, there are two things; now any two 
things have something in common, through 
which they are united in a higher unity. This 
new unit necessarily implies, that is, creates 
or generates its negation and the new unit 
and its negation are in their turn taken up into 
a higher unity. And so the process goes on 



A UNIVERSE OP HEGEL 11$ 

everywhere and forever. It may be possible 
to give a diagram or rough scheme of this 
process; in which scheme, however, the mere 
blank form is alone retained, and not the con- 
tents of the real processes. 

This process is thesis, antithesis, synthesis. 
One must take care not to be misled by the 
etymological meanings of the words, or by 
their use in any other connection. (As in- 
stances: Parallel lines exist; these imply non- 
parallel lines. What can be more unlike than 
these; and yet they are subsumed or taken up 
in the higher unity of intersecting lines, 
according as these intersect at a finite or an 
infinite distance. You say that this line inter- 
sects the circle and that that line does not 
intersect the circle; the geometer unites them 
under one conception and says that the for- 
mer intersects the circle in two real, the latter 
in two ideal, points. In politics, a states- 
rights party implies an anti-states-rights party; 
these coalesce in a higher whole, which 
evokes opposition by necessity, to eventuate 
in a deeper agreement, that that which Hegel 
spake unto our fathers may be fulfilled.) 

Now if you would trace out the perpetual 
recurrence of this process in all the details of 
nature and life and science and art, you would 
only be consciously thinking the unconscious 
thoughts of your protceonic self, you would be 



Il6 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

in your own person further exemplifying the 
process that has been going on through all 
time and space. But it is only in its grander 
outlines, in its relation to the beginnings of 
time and space, of nature and spirit that the 
formula of thesis, antithesis, synthesis has 
been much talked of in recent times. 

Let us ascend. We are (or rather, zve are 
not) before matter and mind, where Pure 
Being, Being divested of all its attributes, 
posits or puts itself. Long before, aeons before 
the indefinite, incoherent, homogeneous Spen- 
cerium started on its evolutionary career, 
Hegel's Scin was beginning that process of 
self-unfolding which was to result in Wcscn 
(Essence) and in its course originate all those 
forms or moulds or categories or receptacles 
of things and things themselves and the 
sensations which poor Kant had simply said 
are given without indicating when or where 
or by whom, and quality and finiteness and 
unity and multiplicity and quantity and meas- 
ure and the rest, of which it was to make use 
in thinking, that is, in creating the world. 
Over against itself, when it had enucleated, 
explicated, disentangled these forms which 
implied their own applicability, there suc- 
ceeded to the thesis the antithesis; to the 
Absolute Self by a necessity which you may 
call at once metaphysical, physical, logical, 



A UNIVERSE OF HEGEL II7 

moral, aesthetic, arose the not self, nature. 
Where now is the synthesis? Before answer- 
ing this question, let us look a little more 
closely at the thesis and antithesis. These 
two processes, which are manifested or 
exemplified in every chemical combination, 
in the budding of plants, in the growth of 
animals, in the destinies of nations, in the 
development of worlds, are the same proc- 
esses which were involved in the emergence 
of nature as the negation of the Absolute 
Reason. 

No goading of sense to activity, no opiate 
intensification of the imagination, no plodding 
industry of the understanding, will bring the 
philosophical consciousness. It does not have 
its roots in English insular prejudice that the 
forms, categories, ideas, and so forth, that is, 
the great conceptions under which we classify 
things, had their ultimate origin in experience. 
No German Kantian notion that these great 
principles are native to the individual mind 
merely, as the conditions of the possibility of 
its knowledge, will bring the philosophical 
consciousness. You must have passed through 
all these, however, through all phases, too, of 
materialism, idealism, realism, nihilism, and 
whatever else there may be until these 
myriads of influence and the contradictions 
they involve shall compel you to the philo- 



Il8 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

sophical consciousness. In this you behold the 

truth of this relation of thesis and antithesis 

between Spirit and Nature, but the two 

opposites come together and the contradiction 

is annulled in the higher unity of conscious- 
ness. 



Seven Processes of Language 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 

Where is the English language? This 
question seems to imply a misuse of the word 
''where," unless indeed one means "In what 
localities on earth speakers of English are 
found?" But this is not my meaning. Why 
not then ask the question in such a way as to 
convey your meaning? Because I cannot. 
And yet, if I only knew how! Perhaps, after 
hearing the seven different answers that I 
give to this question, you may discern more 
clearly than at present that we lack an 
interrogative of a signification more general 
than that of "where." 

Where, then, is the English language? On 
innumerable bits of paper, parchment, papy- 
rus, wood, stone, metal, and other material, 
in nearly every land under the sun. There it 
exists to-day as some of it has been existing 
at any moment in these last 800 years. Yes, 
much of it has been existing in this way for 
more than 800 years, shading off in place and 
time into other languages without number; 
so that it is hard to say where the English 

language ends, and where something else 

121 



122 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

begins — some language that is not English, 
It may seem singular to you that our copious 
English has no word to stand for this mani- 
festation of itself. This is the seen language, 
the visible language, the language that is or 
may be read. I might call it the "lect." I 
want a term that shall draw your attention 
away from the mode in which this "lect'* is 
produced, and make prominent the fact only 
that we use our eyes to recognize it with; and 
that is something which fails to be expressed 
by the phrases, written language, printed, en- 
graved or type-written language. There it is, 
reposing in thousands of libraries, or moving 
from place to place over the great land and 
ocean highways of the world— an incessant 
stream which swells from year to year, its 
eddies sprinkling your desk with letters every 
morning. Picture to yourself this universe 
of script and print and inscription. Does it 
not seem as if man had added a new realm to 
nature? Everyone that has eyes can see this 
language, and few suspect their liability to 
confound it with anything else. Where it is 
all can learn, but what it is, its origin, its 
changes, its relation to other phenomena both 
in and out of language, are matters that few 
may understand. Here a character that 
stands for a single sound, and again for a 
group of sounds, and here one that represents 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 1 23 

a whole word or sentence; and another that 
does not stand for a sound at all, but for some 
idea; here again characters that have ceased 
to stand for anything, and there others that 
never did stand for anything. This English 
has a story of its own; and most stubbornly 
has it resisted the most persistent efforts to 
mould it into new forms which would establish 
a one-to-one correspondence of itself to some 
other series. But let me pass to one of these 
other series, leaving this first and simplest 
answer to my question *'\Vhere is the English 
Language?" that it is found in sight-English. 
But here is another answer. The English 
language exists at this instant in multitudinous 
movements of the particles of the air — vibra- 
tions and oscillations, as we call them; exists 
for a moment, and disappears as rapidly as it 
is called into being; exists in this way over a 
greater part of the earth's surface than any 
other language. In this state of existence, it 
is not discernible by any one of our senses, 
but only inferable from certain indications 
that our senses furnish. But we can picture 
to ourselves the unsensible, that is, the invis- 
ible, the inaudible, the intangible, in imagina- 
tion; and very curious, hardly recognizable, 
not even surmised to exist by many, is this 
language of ours which floats in the air 
around us. 



124 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

**0r like the snow falls in the river, 
A moment white — then melts for ever; 
Or like the boreal is race, 
That flit ere you can point their place; 
Or like the rainbow's lovely form 
Evanishing amid the storm." 

Have you ever tried to represent to your- 
self the English language as it must exist 
between you and me, in the air there, if it is 
ever to get from you to me, or from me to 
you? If you have ever made the effort to 
imagine the space between us while we are 
talking to each other, there can be no limit to 
your admiration for the genius of Helmholtz, 
that great philosopher of our century, eminent 
as mathematician, as physicist, and as physi- 
ologist, the Newton of the nineteenth century, 
who has done in our time for sound what that 
great investigator did in the seventeenth 
century for light. No poet or priest can 
reveal these mysteries to us. We cannot 
expect him to concentrate his gaze on a 
cubic yard of air, and to experiment, reason 
and calculate, till he can, not merely assert, 
but prove his assertion, that thus it is in that 
cube of air, and not otherwise. Poet and seer 
may desire to **know what holds the earth 
together in its inmost sphere; see whence 
production has its birth, see all the germs of 
life appear;" but his emotions unfit him for 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 12$ 

pursuing the only course that will lead to a 
result independent of his individual impres- 
sions. On the other hand, a scientist, a 
Helmholtz, takes his stand nor swerves till he 
triumphs over the secret hid in that volume 
of air; and tells the story of how he did it 
all in that huge book of his, so that anyone 
of our, or of any after, time can, if he will, 
hear the atmosphere's story told, and know 
that not only did such things take place once, 
but that they take place now whenever you 
supply the specified conditions. Just consider 
a moment. It has long been known that the 
duration of any sound I utter has for its 
counterpart, or correlative, a continuation of 
air-waves, one following the other; that the 
pitch of any sound I utter has for its counter- 
part the rapidity with which the wave passes 
a certain point, or the number of wave-crests 
that pass that point in a second; that the 
loudness of any sound I utter is represented 
out there in the air by the degree of condensa- 
tion of the wave. Sounds may differ in pitch, 
in loudness, in duration; but sounds differ 
from one another in so many other particulars. 
All this natura sonans, this sonant nature, this 
world of sounds, this inexhaustible quarry for 
singer and musician and poet— does it have a 
corresponding naiura vibrans, a vibrant nature, 
a world of vibrations in the air that surrounds 



126 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

US? We surely distinguish ball from kiity even 
when both sounds, having the same dura- 
tion, the same pitch, the same intensity, go 
along with air-waves that have the same 
duration, the same rapidity, the same degree 
of condensation. What is there then in the 
air that answers to this difference between 
ball and kin? This is the question which 
Helmholtz asked himself, and to which he 
found an answer. An illustration drawn from 
another source may make the answer plainer, 
not indeed in its detail and exactitude; will 
not tell you just what there is in air-English 
that matches ball and /v;/, but will tell you 
what is the character of that something. This 
is the illustration: Look out on the ocean; 
you see a line of billows, from crest to crest 
more than a vessel's length. Over the surface 
of these swelling billows climb waves. Flitting 
over the waves, as these sweep over the 
billows, are troops of wavelets; and there you 
see a swirl of eddies, skurrying over and amid 
these little waves, and whifts of ripples dance 
over the whole and run into the dizziest whirl 
of foam. Now something like this is going on 
in the air; and it is these eddies and ripples 
among the air-waves, the aerial vibrations, in 
other words, that we find the counterpart of 
that which makes the sonorous difference 
between ^^// and kin. Homer speaks of cpca 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 127 

pteroeiita, winged words; and I am inclined to 
think that this epithet was then more scientific 
than poetic. How could he account for the fact 
that the word went from "me" to "you" more 
satisfactorily to himself than by supposing that 
it had invisible wings to bear it away? But 
we know that it is not the word that goes, but 
simply curiously intricate pulsations of the 
air. But it is not in the air alone that this 
vibrationary English exists. Walls, chairs, 
tables, windows, wires — but why enumerate? — 
your fire-screen there comports itself very 
differently in the presence of a Frenchman, 
let me assure you, from its behavior when an 
Englishman calls. In the air between two 
persons who are talking together in a room; 
in the chord by which they communicate when 
they use that toy called a lover s telegraph; in 
the wire that stretches miles in length from 
one telephone to another, exists this vibration- 
English. It is essentially the same in all. 
The phonograph simply sets up the same 
motions in the air that were originally pro- 
duced by the mouth that talked into it. And 
in passing, let me observe that English exists 
in one of its forms on the cylinder of the 
phonograph, though I had not included this 
in my enumeration of the places or states in 
which the English language is found. 
"The mouth that talked into it," I said; and 



128 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

this brings me to a third whereabouts of 
English. Let me call it physiological English 
for the nonce, though mouth-English is a 
more significant term. Suppose that while an 
Englishman is speaking, it were possible to 
take instantaneous photographs every few 
seconds of the whole articulatory apparatus; 
we should have a series of pictures which would 
be as significant to one who had studied it as 
our written English is, and that scries of 
motions which these pictures would in part 
represent, of palate, tongue, teeth, lips, would 
if we could interpret it, be as definite an 
expression of the speaker's meaning as are 
the words we hear. Why, the successive 
positions of those organs of speech which are 
visible suflice alone to enable those who have 
studied these indications to catch the speaker's 
meaning, but there is no doubt that the whole 
language — every hue and tinge and. shade of 
it — is paralleled by these series of positions 
of the vocal organs. The study of these facts 
forms part of the science of phonetics. There 
are diagrams which are intended to show the 
various positions the articulatory apparatus 
assumes when pronouncing the sounds 
indicated by the letters. INIore attention is 
now given to this physiological English than 
ever before, with this result among others that 
a difference has been detected among sounds 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 1 29 

supposed to be alike, when once the attention 
has been directed to a difference of position in 
the organs by which the sounds were made; 
on the other hand, sounds between which no 
difference can be discerned, have been shown 
to be producible in a number of different ways, 
that is, by different motions of the articulating 
parts. It is on this physiological English that 
the visible speech of Mr. Alexander Graham 
Bell is based. Every letter of this alphabet 
represents, not as in ordinary alphabets, a 
certain sound, but that position of the parts 
of the mouth by which this sound is made. 
The startling originality of this conception 
was well matched by the patience and 
assiduity which worked it out in detail; and 
in his studies of this other English, this 
mouth-English, which we all use without 
noticing it, lies the germ of the invention of 
his now more famous son, Graham Bell. It 
was by dropping those Englishes with which 
we are all familiar and taking up those with 
which we are not habitually occupied at all, 
that Visible Speech and the Telephone were 
worked out. Vibration-English and mouth- 
English, things that most Englishmen know 
nothing about, have, when once the attention 
of competent persons was fixed upon them, 
revolutionized the methods of instructing 
deaf-mutes, begun to change all our proc- 



130 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

esses of teaching languages, made it pos- 
sible for a traveler to take down the speech of 
a barbarian stranger with such exactness that 
his correspondent can reproduce it with the 
greatest fidelity, and enabled Boston and New 
York to converse together with as much ease 
as you and I in this room. 

But we may enlarge our conception of 
mouth-English. Since the whole organism 
reacts in some degree in response to the 
action of any part, it follows that English is in 
a peculiar sense embodied in the children of 
English-speaking parents. All the testimony 
of all the statistics in the world would not 
convince me that an English-born babe would 
not learn English more easily than an infant 
of French parentage placed in the same 
surroundings. 

This brings us to the English language 
existing as a nerve-process, or rather as a two- 
fold nerve-process, corresponding to the double 
attitude of hearer and speaker; yes, a four- 
fold nerve-process when we take into account 
reader and writer as well. No physiologist 
doubts that something different is going on in 
the brain when one writes and when one 
speaks, when one hears and when one reads. 
Sometimes one of these faculties is impaired 
without immediately involving an impairment 
of either of the others. This led Techmer to 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE I31 

recommend the separate and distinct learning 
of the spoken and the written language. 
Associate, that is to say, the spoken word 
with the meaning, and the written word with 
the meaning, and not, as is usually the case in 
schools, associate the spoken and the written 
word. As languages are now learned, aphasia, 
or an affection of the nerves that makes 
talking impossible, involves agraphia, or the 
inability to write down one's thoughts. 
According to Techmer's plan, the one of these 
would not be necessarily complicated with the 
other. 

But not in visible signs, not in air or any 
vibratory medium, not in nerve or in the 
reactions of the organism, not in the suc- 
cessive position of the articulatory organs — ; 
not in any of these— can the language be said 
so truly to exist as in this very world or 
universe of sounds themselves. Here language 
lives and moves; and yet all the names that 
are applied to this, to this succession of sounds, 
are taken from some thing associated with 
this succession, and have misleading sug- 
gestions. Instance the English tongue, the 
Y^w^v^ langtiage {Jingua)\ the English 5/^<:rr/i 
is somewhat better. The English talk, if we 
could use the expression, directs our atten- 
tion still better to the sound itself, and with- 
draws it more easily from the tongue, the 



132 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

teeth, the air, the ear, the letters, the per- 
petual accompaniments in nature and in 
thought of these sounds. It is a sad reflec- 
tion that this, the spoken language, has been 
crowded out of men's thoughts by the written 
language. There can of course be no likeness 
between these, only a correspondence. This 
correspondence may have any degree of 
exactness. In no language, however, is the 
correspondence very exact; in English it is 
very inexact. Changes of stress, of pitch, of 
pause, of duration, of individual utterance, are 
not marked at all. Even what is left of the 
sound after deducting all this, is either under- 
indicated, or over-indicated, or mis-indicated; 
or, when indicated, indicated in a very 
unpractical and inelegant manner. Tennyson 
laments, as he composes his verses, that the 
subtle succession of sounds he has sought to 
seize cannot be preserved, can hardly be 
expressed by the symbols he tries to represent 
them by. Luckily the world clings to the 
bad, and it is hard to change all this. Luckily, 
I say, for how else can we hope that they will 
cling to the good when they get it? 

This half-century has indeed witnessed a 
glorious revival, a veritable renaissance, of 
the sounds of the Latin and Greek languages. 
Even the long silent rhythms of the latter 
have awakened to life. Order, symmetry and 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 1 33 

beauty have been discovered where all was 
confusion. But who would undertake to 
reconstruct our rhythms from the texts of 
to-day with no other key to them than the 
texts themselves? The English language has 
numerous faults at its best, and many of these 
our schools have done their utmost to per- 
petuate; but, by and large, there is no 
language fitted to cope with the English in 
the struggle for existence from the simple 
fact that the English represents the highest 
stage of linguistic development, and all prog- 
ress in other languages is toward the Eng- 
lish type. Were it not for the utterly inde- 
fensible difficulties of our orthography, we 
would have made even the thought of such a 
thing as Volapiik impossible. But my aim was 
an exposition, not an argument, still less a 
declamation. But there is another English 
that awaits attention. 

*'\Vhat," says some one, **this complex of 
sounds and sights and air-pulses and wagging 
jaws and nerve tremors, singly or all put 
together, is that what you call English? 
Would the sounds, sky^ river, bird, tree, moon, 
and so forth, be English, be language at all, 
if no thoughts went along with them? And 
docs not the English language exist in this 
thought-scries?" The reviews make sport of 
Prof. Max Mueller s assertion that language 



134 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

IS thought; that there is, there can be, no 
thought without language; that, in effect, if 
there were no word irccy or some such symbol, 
there would be no tree for us. Prof. Max 
Mueller, I grant, has many thoughts, for which 
it would be hard for anyone, even for the 
Professor himself to find any scientific founda- 
tion. Such was his unfortunate Turanian 
group of languages. Such was the notion 
which he shared with his time that the Indo- 
Europeans had their origin in Asia. Such was 
his theory, not his alone, of the three stages in 
the development of language. Such was his 
theory of mythology, and his reconstruction 
of the religious past. Deduct all these things 
and even more; we can still leave him his 
contention that language is thought and 
thought is language. Not that even here his 
doctrine needs not to be pruned of many 
excrescences, and its exposition translated 
into the language of another system of 
thought than his own. What is worth retain- 
ing of this doctrine, somewhat paradoxically 
expressed, *'\Vithout language, no thought"? 

The change has been from homogeneous to 
heterogeneous, from indefinite to definite, 
from incoherent to coherent. I use Spencer's 
terms to express a fact that is admitted by all 
without committing myself to their implica- 
tions in the Spencerian philosophy. Now a 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE I35 

mind that is at any stage of that process 
does violence, as it were, to itself, to retrace 
its course, to rethink what it has outgrown. 
What is it that has given our thoughts their 
present arrangement, has made there to be 
thoughts at all? What, but social intercourse, 
communication, and that which makes com- 
munication possible, language? Consider 
your experience of sights, colors, odors, stars, 
clouds, suns, moons, meteors, tempests, light- 
nings, thunders, that rush of ever-changing 
sensations that makes up one of the strands of 
life from infancy to maturity; were it not 
that you have the word **sky," how would you 
discern its meaning amid this cluster of 
impressions? Is it not this word that gives 
unity to that experience? Pass in review all 
the times when you have heard that word, 
all the myriads of sentences into which it has 
entered. Remember that you did not look 
up the meaning of the word in the dictionary, 
that you did not get at it through the medium 
of other words, that it was not told to you; 
but that you have been going on guessing 
more or less consciously what English speak- 
ers mean by that word. In time that symbol, 
that sound, **sky," groups and connects and 
unifies and substantializes all these elements, 
makes of them a coherent whole, which, in 
the absence of such a connecting link, would 



136 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

have lain dispersed and disordered in the 
mind. **Words/* says Sir William Hamilton, 
**are nothing but signs for the factitious unities 
of thought." ** Factitious" — mark the word! 
Signs, not for things, but for what we have 
put together and agreed to call things. That 
perhaps is all that things are. Why we have 
put some experiences together and connected 
them by a name, and not put other things 
together in thought nor connected them by a 
name, is a question which it is almost useless 
for anyone to attack who has not an 
acquaintance with many languages and many 
minds. It should be the aim of some school 
to supply these conditions, and by neither 
attacking nor defending, in the present con- 
fusion, any single doctrine, to enable men to 
see of what elements it consists and what is 
its range. 

Survey the scene that our minds present. 
We ascribe reality to what our names stand 
for. Adam probably thought till he learned 
better that the monkeys on the limb were a 
part of the tree, and gave, foolishly enough, a 
single name to what he mistook for a unity. 
We find it difficult to believe that our own 
minds are merely bundles of just such 
Adamitic conceptions. We do not often have 
occasion to speak, as of an indivisible whole, 
of the group of phenomena involved or con- 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 1 37 

nected in the transit of a negro over a rail- 
fence with a melon under his arm while the 
moon is just passing behind a cloud. But 
if this collocation of phenomena were of 
frequent occurrence, and if we did have 
occasion to speak of it often, and if its happen- 
ing were likely to affect the money market, we 
should have some name, as **wousin," to 
denote it by. People would in time be dis- 
puting whether the existence of wousin 
involved necessarily a rail-fence, and whether 
the term could be applied when a white man 
was similarly related to a stone wall. 

Let us not flatter ourselves that we have 
no such words in our minds, centers of crystal- 
lization, around, which are grouped our own 
concepts which we mistake for realities. Yes, 
reality is such a word; mind is such a word; 
English is such a word. After all the phases 
of existence which I have attributed to the 
English language, seen English, air-English, 
mouth-Iinglish, nerve-English, sound-English, 
sense-English — I fear that I shall have to 
admit, on nearer and closer scrutiny, that 
what we call English does not exist at all. 
English is an abstraction from a multitude of 
individuals or particulars. Does Bunyanese 
exist? Where shall we find Carlylese? If a 
book should be found, and one man should 
contend that Bunyan wrote it, and another 



1 33 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

should deny this, each would assume the 
existence of some standard of Bunyanese by 
which the question might be decided. If you 
have ever read such controversies, and used 
your best endeavor to find out what was the 
Bunyanese of A, and what the Bunyanese of 
i?, and what the real Bunyanese (the only one 
that would satisfy your love of truth), you 
might come to question whether there was 
such a thing as Bunyanese after all. 

And now take that much wider abstraction, 

the English language. Here is a name. It 

stands for something in my mind and in 

yours. Whether the two agree or not, we 

have not many opportunities of ascertaining. 

Now what is the signification of your name? 

Can you give me any test by which what is 

English is without fail discriminated from 

what is not English? I have been looking 

and hearkening for this English at intervals 

my life long; all I can find is a scrap here, a 

bit there, and the English language I fear I 

shall never get to hear or to see or to know. 

Or shall I say of it as Saint Augustine says of 

Time: "Ask me what English is, I do not 

know; do not ask me, I know"? This general, 

this abstract, this ideal English, this standard 

which most appear to think exists somewhere, 

though few can agree as to where it is to be 

found, we may almost conclude that it never 



SEVEN PROCESSES OF LANGUAGE 1 39 

has existed, does not exist now, and never will 
exist till the Pure and True is established 
among men. 

Let us now briefly recapitulate, though in a 
different order. We may place at one end of 
the series thought-English, that is, emotions 
and feelings so grouped and arranged as to be 
communicable by an Englishman to an 
Englishman. The next stage is nerve-English 
which breaks up into several different dialects, 
as it were, according to the direction in which 
the nerve-force moves on to the muscles, 
where something exists which we had not 
previously noted but which might be called 
muscle-English. Next, we have movement- 
English, and this likewise divides itself into 
several species; for the fingers may move as 
in writing or typewriting or in making the so- 
called deaf-and-dumb alphabet, or the move- 
ment may be limited to the lungs and mouth. 
We come, now to vibration-English and this 
again is of several kinds; inasmuch as the 
vibrations may be of the luminiferous ether, 
or of air or of some solid as a wire. The first 
results in sight-English, the others in sound- 
English. But at this point these Englishes 
,are converted into nerve-English again, to 
become in its turn thought-English. But 
nowhere in all these transfers do we find the 
abstract, the ideal English. 



140 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

So intricate is the language-process when 
viewed even thus cursorily. There are those 
who have studied each of these languages 
with as much detail as the present stage of 
our advancement allows. Exact measure- 
ments have taken the place of vague 
imaginings. Force, pitch and duration have 
been analyzed by means of instruments of 
precision; and there is already hope of general 
agreement on many points which are involved 
in the true theory of ''mere words." 



Nine Uses of Language 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE 

The shapes of animals that live to-day on 
the earth are but a remnant of thenumberless 
forms that have existed. Tennyson says of 
Nature: **So careful of the type she seems, so 
careless of the single life." And then he 
adds: "So careful of the type? But no, from 
scarped cliff and quarried stone she cries: *A 
thousand types are gone; I care for nothing; 
all shall go.' " The movements of animals as 
well as their shapes have undergone a similar 
succession of changes. The accumulations of 
nervous energy are discharged along muscles. 
These produce countless movements, visible 
and invisible. Some of these movements 
impair or destroy the organism that makes 
them. There survive then the movements 
that maintain or promote the efficiency of 
organisms; and, together with these, numerous 
motions that are practically indifferent. Some 
of these, however, turn out to be really useful 
in a new way, in expending a superfluous 
amount of energy which might else prove 
detrimental either by interfering with desir- 
able movements or by setting up undesirable 
movements. Among the indifferent move- 

143 



144 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

ments are certain of those made by jaws, lips, 
tongue and palate. These indifferent move- 
ments are constantly associated with those 
that the organism must perform in the chew- 
ing and swallowing of food and in breathing. 
Accordingly they become the easiest to make 
and are constantly repeated without conscious 
'effort. Now these motions are precisely such 
as communicate to air the vibrations that 
make the sounds of common speech; and the 
first use of talking — of "tonguing" — the first 
function of language is to dissipate super- 
fluous and obstructive nerve-force. This first 
and earliest service language still continues to 
perform. These muscular movements that 
result in vocal sounds, some may hesitate to 
call language. They may be bound by the 
distinctions that words have fastened on their 
minds. They may at least call these mouth- 
made sounds the raw material of language, or 
language in the rough. Long before reflec- 
tion, before consciousness even, through ages 
on ages, this stratum was, from which all 
speech of men has been quarried — all song, all 
poetry, all literature; but the material pre- 
ceded the use made of it. Grant that this is 
language at so low a stage that man's fellow 
creatures may surpass him in it, still we must 
note the beginnings of things to understand 
the riper growths. These utterances repeat 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE I45 

themselves, they exhibit resemblances and 
differences, they recur in certain sequences, 
they reemerge when the incidents happen 
again that first called them forth. The flow 
of nervous energy wears its own channel. 
The sounds become habits. They acquire 
definiteness in the chirping and twittering of 
birds, in bowlings, roarings, bleatings, bray- 
ings, in whisperings, hummings, gruntings, 
sighings, ah-and-ohings, and so forth — names 
all too definite now to express that wonder- 
fully varied infinitude of unintentional, uncon- 
scious modulations, which, originally accom- 
panying necessary actions, become associated 
with feelings, and affording relief to pent-up 
energies, constitute the nucleus of human 
speech. Is it possible to find out what was 
first done with this accumulated material, and 
thus ascertain the second use of language? 

This second use is the direction of motion 
in others, both men and animals. There may 
be little consciousness either in the utterer or 
in the hearer, and yet a cry may serve to 
attract or repel, to cause rest or motion, to 
establish relations of action among the 
members of a community. The utility of these 
actions may lead to their frequent repetition, 
although there may be no thought of their 
utility nor intention of producing the result 
which follows. A later stage of reflection may 



146 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

disclose the usefulness of the connections thus 
established between sounds and actions, but it 
seems certain that no foresight of such utility 
led to their adoption. Pulses of air impinging 
on ear-drums might arouse very little con- 
sciousness even of sounds, might suggest no 
idea of the situation of things such as would 
be awakened in a developed intelligence, yet 
might unlock nervous energy which would be 
dissipated in motion. This condition was 
once all but universal, and still survives in the 
animal world and in many relations of human 
life. It is found too amid civilizations, even 
in our schools. So long as the utterance of 
certain sounds secures the performance of 
certain processes, there may be very little 
ideation required either in teacher or learner. 
This unconscious or subconscious response in 
action to unconsciously uttered sounds, plays 
a great part in all social piocesses. We are 
much more automatic than many of us sup- 
pose; and a great deal of what is called con- 
certed action has its origin less in will and 
intelligence than in organization. It is the 
response of the bud to the sun, of the lungs to 
the influent air. Many of these reactions may 
never rise into consciousness; or, if once they 
emerge, may pass out of consciousness again, 
should the environment become constant. 
Some change in surroundings brings about 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE I47 

a conflict of opposing impulses, awakens con- 
sciousness; and language assumes its third use 
or function; that of the communication of 
ideas. There is nothing mysterious about 
this, nothing more mysterious than that the 
odor of a rose should bring the memory of its 
shape. Those sounds which we call language 
have no other power to awaken ideas in our 
mind than that which they derive from having 
been previously associated in our experience 
with these ideas. The processes by which 
millions of men have come to think alike 
when they hear book, nioiuitain, tlic, wJicn^ 
politicaly conchoid, the S7cn will rise io-inorrozv\ 
ctc^y was long and intricate; and the possibility 
of a knowledge of the details is lost to us 
forever. The general conditions and aspects 
of the process may be ascertained. At any 
rate it is no longer possible to believe that the 
sounds carry about the meaning with them. 
Bibles and oaths and creeds and platforms 
and laws have been discussed as if the con- 
nection between sound and sense was like that 
between two intersecting lines and four co- 
vertical angles^ — as if one could never think of 
the one without the other. Men seemed to 
believe that the meaning of words could be 
learned from verbal definitions. The pos- 
sibility of communication rests less on language 
than on sympathy and similar experiences. 



148 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

A sound goes at one time with an infinity of 
particulars — Europe, the linglish Constiiititon; 
at another, with only one or a few, point, 
furlong. The sound shifts from meaning to 
meaning, from like to like, from near to near, 
from less to more, from more to less, and 
across every possible link that exists between 
thought and thought. For the meaning of 
words we go to life, to experience, to thought, 
to things, and only in the last resort to the 
dictionaries. They can help only those that 
have helped themselves. Dictionaries are as 
meaningless to many as if they were not full 
of meaning. The phenomena that have. been 
named vanish in comparison with those that 
have never been named. In no respect do the 
inferences that are made from language differ 
from the inferences that are made from any 
other signs or things, that is, as inferences. It 
would be hard to establish any important 
difference between the origin of our knowl- 
edge of the relation of language to other 
phenomena which are called its meaning, and 
the origin of our knowledge of the relation of 
the outside of a tree to its inner structure, or 
the relation between any two series of facts 
that imply each other's peculiarities. There 
are metaphors apart from language, meton- 
ymies, or rather metasemacies, synecdoches, 
ambiguities, and the like, in geology for 



NINB USES OF LANGUAGE I49 

instance, in any present indications from which 
we infer what we do not immediately 
experience. Even in language intention is 
insignificant in comparison with other agencies; 
and to Nature intentions are still ascribed 
even by those who know better. In the 
versifications of overworn philosophies, we 
find: **For words, like Nature, half reveal and 
half conceal the soul within," and again: "But 
I who seeking everywhere her secret meanings 
in her deeds, and finding that of fifty seeds 
she often brings but one to bear." Where all 
is mystery, it is time to outgrow the provin- 
cial habit of finding something peculiarly 
mysterious in guessing at the thoughts of 
our fellows from the sounds their mouths 
make. Every parish has its pool that has 
never been fathomed. 

The fourth use of language is for expression. 
The habit of communication has become so 
ingrained in social man that even when alone 
by himself, he puts his thoughts in words. If 
he does not speak or write the words, he 
imagines them. He feels dissatisfied until he 
has contrived some expression for his thought. 
He may talk to an imaginary hearer or to 
himself, or may think in words with no con- 
sciousness of his fellowmen. Curious lan- 
guages have grown in this way in the minds 
of lone thinkers and investigators, which are 



150 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

Utterly unintelligible to others, but as con- 
sistent and decipherable as a cuneiform 
inscription. The language of expression may 
"spread the images abroad that else lie dark 
and buried in the soul," but it does not, like 
the language of communication, produce "that 
which makes thousands, perhaps millions 
think." It is often difficult for one who has 
caught new views of things to translate the 
language of expression into that of communi- 
cation. The necessity of communication 
forces us to ask what the signs mean to 
others; for our own purposes we may use 
them in any relation we please. (Co-punct) 
(triangle-angle bisectors) and (Man sit table) 
(write) are expressions which, however 
intelligible and useful, and for some purposes, 
necessary to myself, must become in order to 
be understood, "The lines bisecting the angles 
at the vertices of a triangle meet in one 
point," and "The man who is sitting at the 
table is writing." Phenomena admit of very 
different classifications from those on which 
the makers of language have laid stress. 
New forms may be desired which shall be the 
same for expression and for communication. 
Perhaps they may get themselves intro- 
duced and one day become universal. Mathe- 
matics, chemistry, biology, and commerce are 
pointing the way. 



NINE USES OP LANGUAGE 15I 

The fifth use of language is for purposes of 
record. Long before the introduction of 
writing, sentences were committed to memory. 
They were made easier to learn by being 
thrown into some form of verse, and at the 
same time less easy to alter by omissions or 
insertions. Verse-forms have had many 
origins, but their introduction and retention 
were facilitated by the possession of the prop- 
erty of being easy to remember and hard to 
change; and they gained impressiveness from 
being associated with chronicles and precepts, 
prayers and hymns. Persons remarkable for 
a retentive memory must have been highly 
valued, whatever their deficiencies in other 
respects might have been. Yet the invention 
of writing and of printing gave a great exten- 
sion to this function of language. The phono- 
graph has added another possibility. Nothing 
is preserved but the symbols; the meaning 
they once had is recoverable by processes 
precisely analogous to those by which any 
facts not directly observable are ascertained. 
There are many other records than language 
proper; and the name language has been 
extended to all things that have served as 
records. 

There is a sixth use of language — a natural 
consequence of its other uses. What compels 
actions and movements in our fellows, whether 



152 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

men or animals, why should it not constrain 
those other things which the philosophers and 
poets even of the twentieth century endow 
with life and personality — set matter in motion 
and even call down the moon from the sky? 
Angels and demons respond to charms, spells, 
incantations, mystical sentences — relics often- 
times of old speech whose meaning has been 
forgotten. The gods have a language of 
their own, never used except in addressing 
them, or by those entitled to address them. 
This use of language still obtains with the 
great majority of the human race; but it has 
been abandoned by a few either because they 
have ceased to believe that there is anything 
to influence, or because they no longer believe 
that anything but visible and tangible animals 
can be influenced in that way. Moral grounds 
have been alleged for abandoning this use: 

"How pure at heart and sound in head, 
With what divine affections bold, 
Should be the man whose thoui;ht would hold 
An hour's communion with the dead. 

V'ln vain shalt thou or any call 
The spirits from their golden day. 
Except like them thou too canst say, 
^ly spirit is at peace with all." 

That use of language which stands seventh 
in my enumeration is the most difficult to 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE 153 

exhibit intelligibly — the use of language as an 
instrument in thinking. By thinking I mean 
just simply the process of making inferences, 
whether from original data or from other 
inferences. The beginnings and the endings 
of this process may be almost exactly alike in 
a hundred individuals, but the intermediate 
steps may differ as a modern flour-factory from 
an ancient grist-mill. Each takes grain and 
delivers flour, but there all resemblance ends. 
Nearly all our thinking is symbolical, some- 
times most absurdly and grotesquely s^^m- 
bolical; but still it serves its purpose. This 
symbolism is commonly made by dropping 
those aspects of the subject which do not 
immediately interest us; and carrying the 
mere skeletons and fragments of things 
through the thought-process. At times these 
skeletons of things are replaced by something 
more sketchy and shadowy and evanescent. 
Artists, musicians, poets come the nearest to 
reality; the thinker finds some bit of machin- 
ery which will transport him with his eyes 
shut and without loiterings by the way from 
start to finish. One of these machines is the 
speech-image. This surely is as little like the 
reality which we say it stands for as may be. 
But since words hang together with words as 
things with things, since there is a certain 
parallelism between the two series, we may 



154 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

travel some distance along the word-way, 
instead of traveling along the thing-way; and 
we may appear to ourselves and to others to 
be thinking things, when we are merely think- 
ing language. There are some symbols not 
so good for this purpose as language is. 
There are some which in certain matters are 
so much better that they do what language 
cannot do at all (ordinary language, I mean); 
while on the other hand there arc results of 
thinking which could not be obtained at all 
without language or symbols of sight or sound 
analogous to language. 

Suppose some one to assert: The ^ostak 
distims tlie dashes. You do not know what this 
means; nor do I. But if we assume that it is 
English, we know that the dashes are distiinmed 
by the gastak. We know too that one distinivier 
of dashes is a gostak. If moreover the dashes 
are galloons, wq know that same gallaoiis are 
distimnied by the gostak. And so we may go 
on, and so we often do go on, not employing 
the words to stand for things or to call up 
thoughts to our minds, but to replace things,, 
to be substitutes for thoughts. A whole para- 
graph may be composed in this way, statement 
being linked to statement, without any sus- 
picion on the part of writer or speaker, that he 
IS doing something quite remarkable. Rules 
learned in childhood, maxims and proverbs, 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE 15$ 

general statements quite as meaningless as the 
above, are frequently the sole contents of the 
mind of him who utters them. The classi- 
fications already made, the feelings that cluster 
about them, the words that express them, 
dominate the mind and incapacitate it from 
doing anything but repeat the old formulas. 
A language developed copiously and symmet- 
rically makes easier this process of word- 
thinking. If there were noun, verb, adjective 
and adverb, related in form as well as in 
meaning, the substitution of phrase for phrase 
would require less attention than where, as in 
English, meaning and form so often conflict; 
as, boy^ boyish, puerile. Thought may ebb 
very low, the stream of language may flow in 
its place; and this seventh use come to resem- 
ble the second, the liberation of motion, no 
longer instantaneous indeed, but after an 
interval. The old logicians had a glimpse of 
this use of language. They fancied that it 
admitted of unlimited extension. They 
believed that language had a quite peculiar 
relation to thought; and they converted its 
sentences into propositions, which they twisted 
into hideous shapes in order to elicit from 
combinations of them still other propositions. 
There was nothing objectionable in this 
practical testing of their hypothesis about the 
nature of language. The result did not justify 



IS6 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

their expectations. But modern logicians have 
found better ways of attaining some of the 
things the old logicians sought; and have left 
the discussion of language to grammarians 
and rhetoricians, and to those who like to 
remember what even time forgets. 

It is this aspect of language which has given 
some countenance to such beliefs as that 
language and thought are identical — no 
thought without language. Such ideas spring 
up readily in minds that arc absorbed in read- 
ing and writing, that live in and on libraries, 
that find in books the sources of all they 
know. Sculptors, painters, musicians, archi- 
tects, engineers, are exposed to different 
influences, are likely to come to quite different 
conclusions about language — the language, I 
mean, which men speak and write, and not 
those other things which are called languages 
by those who find in vague and fanciful 
resemblances grounds for misusing names. 

Pass now to the eighth use of language. 
We delight in sounds, even in the noises from 
squibs and cannons. There is no disputing 
about tastes; else so many volumes on aesthet- 
ics would hardly have been written. Pleasure 
that sound gives, some think, is the result of 
some association of the sound with things that 
give pleasure— one's" fellows for instance. 
Whatever its origin, to give delight merely as 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE 157 

sound IS a distinct use of language. Language 
has its meter, its long-short series, its rhythm, 
its loud-soft series, its melody, its high-low 
series, but these it has in common with all 
successions of sounds. It has, besides, its 
peculiar quality, its vowel-consonant series. 
We justly pay great honor to those who mould 
this material of our common talk into new 
forms that reveal to us capabilities of speech 
before undreamed of. The whole language 
is lifted by such efforts. Each becomes 
ashamed of his mumblings and mutterings, 
and would rid himself of his shambling, 
shuffling, slouching speech, hopes indeed that 
instead of being taught to follow a fashion, he 
may learn what the fashion should be. He 
wants a moral pronunciation, a pronunciation 
determined by conformity to ideals, arid not 
suffered to sink to the level of howling with 
the wolves, and doing at Rome as the Romans 
do. Composition waits on execution. There 
can be no great poets, in the sense of masters 
of the resources of speech-sounds, except 
among a people who are. In their measure and 
degree, masters of the sounds of speech. 
Meter, rhythm, melody, color of a phrase, in 
one word, its sound — rivals its meaning. Let 
us forget for a moment that language is any- 
thing else but sound, that it has ever ceased 
to be one with the chirping of crickets, the 



I $8 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

patter of rain, the rustling of leaves, "the coo- 
ing of doves in immemorial elms and murmur 
of innumerable bees." What skill arrays such 
a sequence of syllables in our mother-English 
as the following: 

Look, I come to the test, a tiny poem, 
All composed in a meter of Catullus, 
All in quantity, careful of my motion. 
Like the skater on ice that hardly bears him, 
Lest I fall unawares before the people. 

— Tennyson, 

• But this subtle succession of the crotchets 
and quavers of speech cannot vie with the 
glooms and flashes of the varied resemblances 
and differences of the vowel-consonant 
system: 

All over the gray, soft shallosvs 
Hover the colors and clouds of the twili^^ht, void 

of a star. 
As a bird unfleaged is the broad-winged night, 

whose winglets are callow 
Yet, but soon with their plumes will cover her 

brood from afar, 
Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies 

with their blossoms 
Thick as the darkness of leaf-shadcnved spring is 

encumbered with flowers. — Sivinbiinic, 

But another poet shall delight us with the 
tumultuously regular interchange of soft and 
loud, of weak and strong syllables: 



NINE USES OP LANGUAGE I 59 

Nay, swart spinsters! So I surprise you 
Making and marring the fortunes of man, 

Huddling — no marvel, your enemy eyes you— 
Head by head, bat-like, blots under the ban 

Of daylight, earth's blessing since time began. 

Back to thy blest earth, prying Apollo, 

Shaft upon shaft, transpierce with thy beams 

Earth to the center — spare but this hollow 

Hewn out of night's heart, where mystery seems 

Mewed from day's malice; wake earth from her 
d re a m s ! — Browning. 

But lon^j^s and shorts, labials and gutturals, 
louds and softs arc blended in any utterance 
with hi<^hs and lows, and from these derive an 
infinite variety, an indescribable wealth of 
forms. The repetitions and refrains, in the 
absence of any appropriate notation, indicate 
by their very sameness on the printed page, 
that inflection is required to give the diversity 
desired by ear and taste; not to mention at this 
point the differences of inflection demanded 
by differences of meaning in the same phrase 
when used in different i*)assages. 

To the nine uses of language which I am 
considering others might be added; nor, how- 
ever easy it is to distinguish the uses from 
one another, does any one of them often 
appear unaccompanied by another. Vxoxw our 
consciousness of sounds as sounds, we can 
rarely separate the emotions, not to say ideas, 



l60 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

that have accompanied the sounds in the past; 
and, while we are fancying that we are regard- 
ing language simply as sound, we may be 
compelled to note that the language is reliev- 
ing nervous tension, liberating motion, genera- 
ting ideas and feelings, mirroring our minds to 
ourselves, bridging time, invoking spirits, 
facilitating thought— in a word, performing at 
one and the same time all the functions of 
which it is capable. 

The ninth use of language is the most 
remote, if not from general apprehension, at 
least from general interest. The purely 
scientific aspects of any subject, as animals, 
societies, spaces, has never appealed to many 
minds. There might be few alive, if it had. 
**Providence," said Kepler, *'has kindly 
joined astronomy to astrology, that the latter 
may support the former." Philology, the pure 
science of language, has slowly emerged from 
a world of dreams and superstitions and idle 
hopes. To establish the unity of the human 
race, to prove ourselves the sons of gods, to 
discover some secret whereby nature and men 
could be controlled, to attain some principle 
for the solution of all the riddles of existence; 
or, lower yet, to remount to the sources from 
which the stream of language flowed, and to 
return, bathed and quickened in that spring, 
to move the hearts of men with speech and 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE l6l 

song — who entertains now such hopes? But 
there has arisen meantime the study of stars 
and planets, of the growth of worlds, of 
millions of years of changes in the earth's 
crust before ever a sound was uttered or a 
being existed to utter a sound, of the tribes of 
plants and animals, of hundreds of thousands 
of years of brute humanity, of myriads of 
languages that have perished, of thousands of 
barbarous languages surrounding the few that 
have become vehicles of culture. There has 
arisen too the study of bones and muscles and 
nerves, of the nature of sounds and their 
dependence on vibrations, of the emergence 
and development of brute and human feelings 
and ideas, till language appeared as the late 
sequent of a multitude of phenomena the 
existence and properties of which had been 
established without any appeal to language; 
and then the study of the phenomena of 
language itself, the uniformities, the recur- 
rences of likenesses among them, the so-called 
laws, the rules if you will. These are, of 
course, what some philosophers have called 
derivative laws, that is, laws or facts which 
must be resolved into phenomena outside of 
their own subject. Thus the persistences, the 
repetitions, the survivals, the uniformities, 
even the things which seem the hardest and 
fastest and firmest, have the unity and identity 



1 62 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

of the rainbow or wave-curve, a formal con- 
stancy with incessant change of material, 
perpetually exposed to modification and even 
to extinction. The perishing and perishable 
states of language which I have in mind, are 
not, as you may be supposing, the fads of the 
nineteenth or the humors of the sixteenth 
century, the established slang of any epoch. 
These are the show-flowers of a; season; 
tulips yesterday, chrysanthemums to-day, and 
it may be some strange form of sand-weed to- 
morrow. It is not shapes and colors such as 
these that effort may give to the most intract- 
able material that I am thinking of. I do not 
even mean those deeper persistences which 
have endured for centuries, consisting merely 
in the repetition of countless individuals that 
resemble each other as everyone has come to 
see. Most minds discern some points of 
resemblance between two oysters; and 
amicabalis has many elements of likeness to 
amiable. The uniformities that I mean are 
deeper, more permanent than these. They 
stretch across the ages; they link together 
not like forms, but forms unlike, as you would 
call them, not only at first sight, but at second 
and third sight too. Perhaps we might not 
be educated or educable to see the connection, 
though w^e worked over it for a lifetime. 
But even these highest abstractions of 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE 1 6$ 

linguistic science in seeking which some find 
more delight than in rich viands or costly 
apparel or popular applause or anything else 
the world offers, even these, like Herbert's 
rose, have their roots ever in their graves. 
They are the products of the agency of lips 
and teeth, of lungs and air, of nerves and 
sensations; things which are themselves very 
modifiable and very variable; things which are 
themselves highly derivative; things the laws 
of which, if any should be surmised, can only 
be established by tracing them back to the 
phenomena which precede and underlie them. 
But the philologist has no alternative. The 
methods of modern science arc not now 
Baconian; in fact they never were. The col- 
lection of facts without some purpose, without 
some guiding theory, without some hypothesis 
to refute or confirm, in short without some 
test b^ which to distinguish relevant from 
irrelevant facts, would reduce us to barbarism 
in a century. Mendeleef has said that modern 
science is like the modern bridge. It does not 
rest, as the old, on piers placed at short 
intervals from bank to bank. Through the 
mist and over the chasm it is built out from 
either side. It has no strength and will 
sustain no weight till the two parts meet. 
Will they ever do so? Have we missed our 
calculation? We shall not know till the fabric 



1 64 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

is complete; and with the driving of the last 
bolt, strength diffuses itself through the whole 
and the parts support each other. Language 
is among the most recent phenomena that 
have appeared on the earth. Its thousands of 
earlier years are to be restored only by prob- 
able deductions from the study of savage 
tribes. Of its later years many aspects have 
passed into oblivion. Moving amid hypoth- 
eses and ever seeking facts to test them by, 
the philologist presents to such as will take 
some pains to understand him a picture of the 
language life of the earth. Where did these 
three or four thousand languages come from? 
What are their relations to one another? 
What is their geographical distribution? 
What is their succession in time? What are 
their resemblances and differences? What 
were those missing links which we must sup- 
pose existed to connect and explain tl\e frag- 
ments that we possess? The work has already 
progressed far enough to have established in 
some minds methods of investigation— for- 
mulas for building bridges, to recur to our 
former illustration. The philologist has risen 
above the limitation of his own time, his own 
country and his own language. He has beheld 
languages so different from his own that he 
can make no assertion about them in terms 
of the grammatical vocabulary of his own 



NINE USES OF LANGUAGE 1 65 

speech. He has seen groups of sounds that 
clumsily expressed the rude classifications of 
a savage tribe strained and stretched and 
enlarged to communicate the thoughts of 
millions of civilized men, while yet they retain 
traces of their earliest structure, however 
changed in function, or even useless and 
obstructive they may have become. He has 
been led to see that language has many uses 
and must be looked at from many points of 
view; that it is sometimes a comparatively 
harmless discharge of troublesome nervous 
energy; that it liberates nerve force and sets 
muscles in motion, thus- making co-ordinated 
action in large groups of men and animals 
possible without intelligence; that it estab- 
lishes likenesses in thought and feeling among 
men; that it furnishes each in the privacy of 
his own musings with pegs and lines on which 
he may hang his thoughts to air and dry; that 
it is a set of boxes in which one may pack his 
ideas for future inspection, even if a rather 
insecure repository; that it is a collection of 
spells with which each may control the beings 
of his own other world, if he has one of his 
own, to his own satisfaction; that it will do his 
thinking for him sometimes even better than 
he can do it for himself; that its sounds are a 
symphony which some can compose and hear, 
and some can talk about; and finally the 



1 66 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

philologist sees, though I cannot, that there is 
one use that transcends all other uses, that it 
is namely a subject for study, a subject superior 
to all others; for here theologian and scientist 
and classicist meet, here nature and art com- 
bine, here matter and spirit unite, here the old 
cannot dispense with the new, nor the new 
with the old. 



Many Meanings of Money 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY 

"What terrible blundcrH wc have made in 
finance/' says one. *'Not more terrible than 
others have made," retorts another; **not more 
terrible than we shall make again. We do not 
even know that there is any other way of 
learning than by actual experience; and so 
actual experience wc must have, even if it 
kills us off, to make room for those who may 
be more capable of learning." **But," inter- 
rupts a third, **what you call blunders were 
the wisest things we ever did; we need the 
same measures now and we mean to have 
them." 

Let us turn from the consideration of such 
conflicting views to the contemplation of 
ideals; we may come back as from a mountain 
journey with calmer hearts and with clearer 
vision. 

There is a community where all are perfectly 
intelligent and perfectly honest. Each remem- 
bers distinctly every thing he ever did or 
thought. When one dies, the others inherit 
his knowledge. They have no visible language. 
There is no bookkeeping. They have never 
even experienced the need of a standard of 

value. Why have a medium of exchange, 

169 



170 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

when all things are at will media of exchange? 
Legal tenders — the conception has never 
found lodgment in their minds. No tyrant 
forces them to give more or to take less than 
they have voluntarily agreed to do. They tell 
you on the instant the exchange-ratios of a 
dozen different articles in terms of any one of 
the articles you please. They bear all this 
weight of knowledge lightly like a flower; 
and seem less anxious than our dealers and 
traders. Each makes his purchases with what 
he has to give or with what he promises to 
give or with what he alleges that some one 
has promised to him — he transfers, that is, his 
promise. You would fancy that there was in 
the mind of each a perfect picture of the world 
he lived in; and that every train of cars had 
its counterpart in his thought with images of 
the contents of the freight-wagons. I will not 
weary you with details; each can think them 
out for himself. Is there any money there? 
Yes; this very promise itself — this unspoken, 
unwritten, unrecorded promise; but still a 
promise known, a promise felt, a promise 
trusted, and with good reason. But if perfect 
intelligence and perfect integrity could ever 
have failed to meet the obligations incurred, 
the loss would have been distributed through 
all the community. 

An-d here I encounter a difficulty in making 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY I7I 

myself understood, which arises from no fault 
of mine, I think, and from no fault of yours, 
nor from any defect inherent in the English 
language. It comes from a quality which lies 
in the nature of all things, from the fact which 
the word "Evolution" expresses. Once men 
knew just what they meant by money, some 
time they will know again; now they do not 
know. Changes are taking place in society 
and in our ideas; and one word acquires amid 
the process many meanings. I can give you 
an example of such a change of meaning in 
the word '^tangent." It was once a Latin 
word and meant any. thing whatever that 
touched any other thing. But it is not with 
that old and vague meaning that I am con- 
cerned. It is with three or four meanings 
which will hardly appear to have anything to 
do with one another, if you are not familiar 
with these matters, i. A tangent is a line 
which just touches a curve. 2. A tangent is 
the quotient of one leg of a right triangle by 
the other. 3. A tangent is the sum of the 
following infinite series: 

, 2 „ 16 . 272 , 

35 5'- 7! 
4. A tangent is e^^ - e^^ 

i (^'^ + r'^) 
Now all these different meanings and others 
besides are the result of sliding the word tan- 



1/2 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

gent from one thing to another thing which had 
been found to be implied in the former. Each 
successive meaning is harder to grasp than the 
preceding. It is this shifting of the meaning 
of words, this extension, this spiritualization of 
their signification, that is merely the counter- 
part of a mental growth that does not proceed 
at the same rate in all minds. Human affairs 
are undergoing great changes, and human 
minds are changing to correspond with them. 
Money is the word bandied to and fro; but 
hardly two of the disputants are using it in 
the same sense or are aware of its many 
meanings. The last meaning may be the 
simplest, and yet, paradoxical as it seems, may 
be harder to make intelligible to one who has 
not thought about these things than were the 
earlier views. To this meaning, then, or to 
each and everyone of the instances of this 
meaning, let me give the name **money," But 
what meaning, you ask; what is it that you 
are talking about? You made a long digres- 
sion to tell us what we all knew before, that 
words change their meanings; and now you 
talk about a something or other that you pro- 
pose to name money. Oh, yes, words change 
their meaning. I was not trying to illustrate 
so trivial a truth as that. They change their 
meaning in the minds of thinking men in a 
certain definite way, so that the new meaning 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY 1 73 

IS a something singled out from the old mean- 
ing as being all that was essential for the 
purpose we had in view; it drops superfluities. 
That is what I wanted to say, and I wish to 
show that the new meaning I give to money 
is a meaning implied in every other meaning 
of the word, a meaning that will remain when 
others have been abandoned, a meaning 
toward which the world has been slowly 
moving for centuries and is at length approach- 
ing. I call money then *'a trustworthy promise 
to give certain specified goods or services at 
some sufficiently definite time." This invisible 
promise, rendered reliable by the condition, 
as respects integrity and intelligence, of the 
mind in which it exists, by the resources, cor- 
poreal or material, of the mind that makes it — 
this invisible promise, I say, is that by which 
the greater part of exchanges are effected. 

'*Well, this is a great discovery," laughs 
some one, *'what we have always called credit, 
you propose to call money!" Perhaps I am in 
the wrong, but watch me and see. In the 
unreal community I was describing, every 
person that received goods or services, either 
gave goods and services immediately in return 
or gave his promise to be ready with goods 
and services at some future time. The only 
way in which he could get anything, was by 
giving something in exchange there and then, 



174 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

or promising to give something in exchange 
at some other moment. Now I say he bought 
either with goods or with money, and that 
there is no other conceivable way of getting 
anything (excepting of course gift and theft). 
What you object to is the use of the word 
money in this sense. It seems strange, forced, 
unnecessary. So do some ot the uses of the 
word tangent I instanced seem to a country 
surveyor; those who have done all his thinking 
for him in advance and supplied him with the 
ideas of which he makes practical application, 
have not been of that opinion. The higher 
the intelligence, the virtue and the ability, the 
better does the mere mutually understood 
promise sufifice to effect all the exchanges of 
goods and services that the community wants 
to make. In default of intelligence or virtue 
or ability, more precautions have to be taken, 
securities given for the return of the goods 
and services or their equivalent, there must 
be witnesses, hostages, ceremonies, documents, 
oaths — yes, you may add all the machinery of 
courts of justice, police forces, armies and 
governments. At the one extreme is the 
actual delivery of the very thing required in 
return for the article given or the service per- 
formed; at the other extreme is the mere 
promise manifested in any intelligible way. 
At the one extreme the invisible money; at 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY 1 75 

the Other, barter, no money, because the con- 
dition for the intervention of money does not 
exist. The interval between these is filled in 
two ways: by visible promises, that is, by some 
scrap of record; and by guarantees of requital. 
Bills, bank-notes, checks, book-accounts, store- 
orders are such scraps of record. Precious 
stones, gold, silver and such things are 
guarantees of requital; articles left in pawn, 
as it were, that they might be exchanged for 
the necessary food and clothing and shelter 
when these were not forthcoming or likely to 
be forthcoming on demand. We know how 
these scraps of record, these promises, often 
did not promise the very article or articles 
that would be wanted, but promised some 
other thing as gold or silver instead; we know 
that these guarantees of requital came to be 
regarded as the requital itself. The story has 
been told a thousand times how their desir- 
ability, their divisibility, their durability made 
them media of exchange. But the process of 
their introduction was not so simple as the 
imagination of our hasty reconstructors of the 
past is wont to depict it. 

While on the one hand the pawns or pledges 
have been sliding into the place of the actual 
requital, so that he who proferred gold in 
requital could not be compelled to furnish 
anything else, on the other hand the promises 



176 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

to requite had a growth of their own. That 
rude voucher of a promise made, the tally, has 
constituted the circulating medium of many a 
village community, nay, even of great states. 
The king s commission that gave the husband- 
man a tally for the appropriated cattle or 
grain, knew that it might pass through many 
hands before it should be presented at the 
exchequer in payment of taxes. We have 
then at an early time these two so-called 
moneys: on the one hand the visualized, 
recognizable, transferable promise; on the 
other hand the appropriated or confiscated 
pledge or pawn. 

We have now four aspects of money and 
m^oney's worth and money's sign, which may 
be exhibited in a diagram; though it is doubt- 
ful whether all minds are assisted by diagrams, 
the mere schemes and outlines of the realities 
of the world. 

Promise, on 
gold or silver. 

Pawn or pledge 
as security. 

Things desired. 

A. Things desired. t^ . r 

^^ Promise of 

things desired. 

Promise of gold 
or silver. 

Promise, on 
leather, wood, paper. 



y B. 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY 1 77 

There are then other stages still, other 
aspects of this process of effecting the inter- 
change of commodities and services when time 
must intervene between receiving and 
requiting. 

When the pawn or pledge had become 
established as the final requital itself; the 
promise, on the one hand, came to specify, not 
the things ultimately desired, but the pawned 
gold or silver or precious stones or whatever 
else it might be that would bring their posses- 
sors the things they wanted; and, on the other 
hand, the gold and the silver came to be used 
as the material on which the promise was 
written. 

When a thing has as many attributes as a 
piece of silver, attributes too that can be dis- 
cerned, not by merely gazing on the silver- 
piece, but by the intellect alone; why should 
we wonder at the variety of views and 
expressions, the misapprehensions and half- 
apprehensions of those who cannot be 
expected to have any more distinct compre- 
hension of sociological processes than they 
have of the processes going on in their own 
minds and bodies. This piece of silver is a 
commodity, can supply, that is, some ultimate 
want; it is a security for future requital; it is 
a written promise of future payment; it is a 
promissory note written on material that costs 



178 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

half the face of the note; it has sometimes 
been forced by a sovereign on his subjects who 
are bidden to accept it at his own valuation. 
A curious state of affairs enough. But do you 
not see that in the minds of the disputants in 
private and in public the old and the new are 
contending for the mastery? the usages and 
the habits of centuries and the requirements 
of utterly changed conditions? We are com- 
ing to see that the essential thing, when 
exchanges are not effected by barter, is 
the reliable promise. Trustworthy promises, 
continually made and fulfilled, arc the real 
money of the community; and in the corpora- 
tions, in the boards of trade, in places where 
commerce flourishes, there are even in our 
reviled and execrated days more trustworthy 
promises than were to be found in the councils 
of the great ecclesiastical organizations of the 
past, if history describes their transactions 
with any accuracy. The satisfactory evidence 
of a reliable promise will exchange for 
merchandise as readily as merchandise will 
exchange for merchandise; and millions of 
exchanges are effected in civilized countries 
by means of acknowledgments of indebtedness. 
Their use is extending as rapidly as the 
nature cf men's minds will permit. If the 
reliable promise is the essential thing, surely 
no very bulky or expensive article is needed 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY 1 79 

as the sign, the token, the expression of the 
promise. A promise written on leather, if the 
promise is reliable, is as good as one written 
on gold or silver; but if I have any misgiving 
about your willingness or your ability to 
deliver what you promise, I think I should 
like to have you write it on something 
which would exchange elsewhere if you 
should not fulfill your promise, for as much as 
you promise to give me. I have ventured to 
apply the term money to the reliable promise 
itself. If the burden of its meaning could be 
shifted there, if it could be made plain that 
this is what is essential, then all the propo- 
sitions into which the word money enters 
would be habitually contemplated in a different 
light, and the relations of banks and govern- 
ments to money would not be understood as 
implying that men whom you would not trust 
to manage a bank are competent to create 
money. But to-day the' word money is not 
limited to the promise itself; it is applied to 
certain evidences of such a promise; it is 
applied to the material thing which guarantees 
the performance of the promise; it is applied 
to a material thing that is consumed, a 
commodity. 

An oversight has been made in depicting 
the early interchange and distribution of com- 
modities. Economists have represented barter 



l80 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

as the primitive fact, the original form of 
transfer; but they knew that earlier than that 
was force that not only compelled men to 
surrender the products of their industry, but 
obliged them to accept in return whatever 
the stronger party was pleased to give. This 
survives to-day in civilized communities and 
in great states. There was another form of 
transfer — fraud. This is still practiced. There 
was another form; namely, the bestowal of 
presents, in the hope that some return for 
them would be made in time of need. This 
also remains. Barter too continues among us, 
and every day great exchanges of property for 
property are being made without the inter- 
vention of any so-called money. 

In the midst of all this stood the sovereign 
once, the actual, living, breathing, frowning, 
smiling, fighting, fondling sovereign; and 
interfered right and left, for good and bad; 
arrogated to himself the right to make or 
annul promises, to prescribe exchange-ratios, 
to decree what should be adequate pawns or 
securities for promises. The sovereign may 
have gone, but sovereignty remains, at least 
in the minds of those who see things through 
the medium of abstractions; and learned 
judges detluce thence a justification for sub- 
stituting scraps of record for material guaran- 
tees of payment, justification for confounding 



MANY MEANINGS OF MONEY l8l 

under the same denomination things that 
should be kept distinct in thought and practice. 
But we are in the boyhood, if not in the 
infancy of civilization; and we call ourselves 
civilized merely because our barbarisms are 
enacted on a larger scale and by indirect 
methods. 

But manhood is upon us and we are strug- 
gling toward the conviction that commodities 
are not needed to effect the exchange of com- 
modities; that no one substance like silver 
and gold need be diverted from the thousands 
of uses for which it might be employed to 
serve merely as a medium for exchange. Let 
silver and gold vanish from the earth and the 
producers of goods would continue to 
exchange what they make for what they 
want; certificates of indebtedness, tokens of 
ownership in houses, lands, mills, chattels of 
all kinds, would then as now pass from hand 
to hand in liquidation of claims. Or let silver 
and gold become so abundant that stones in 
New England are not miore so, still the 
business of the world would go on, subject to 
great inconveniences, indeed, so long as men 
should lack intelligence and integrity, but 
when men should have acquired those two 
qualities, go on as well as if silver and gold 
still existed or had never become worthless. 
In fact by the progress of virtue and intelli- 



1 82 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

gence, the precious metals are destined to be 
eliminated from the monetary systems of the 
world. He who sees that all the business and 
trade and industry and commerce of the world, 
call it what you will, all the great and small 
exchanges and distributions, are effected by 
barter and by honest promises — by goods, 
that is, and by money— will see in silver now 
as he may expect to see in gold hereafter, a 
material too valuable to write notes on and 
not valuable enough to serve as a guarantee 
for their payment. 



Some Origins of the Number Two 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO 

When was Two discovered or invented, or 
won by some process which was neither, or a 
blending of both? Surely before a dozen, a 
score or a hundred were known. Its emer- 
gence in the mind of the beast-man antedated 
written and even spoken language. Are there 
to-day animals other than man that see a Two 
as Two? There are men, civilized men, who 
have never conceived Two in all its abstract- 
ness, in all its generality, in all its independ- 
ence. For beasts and savages and most of 
their descendants the Like and the Unlike are 
touches, tastes, smells, odors, colors and 
temperatures; and only a few have forced on 
them the consideration of shapes, sizes, dis- 
tances, of the more or less of this and that. 
One heap or scries or pile or mass was larger 
than another, they might be aware; but exact 
comparison would hardly be made till men had 
to make it. Before Two could appear, some 
such notions were present as are all too 
definitely expressed by our many, few, more, 
less, some. 

Our school-bred generation thinks of the 

symbols, twOy deux^ dno^ zwei^ or more often, 

185 



l86 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

of 2, rather than of the idea or conception or 
phenomenon or reality, or whatever it may be 
that we are now seeking the origin of. 

The likeness one man is conscious of, 
another cannot discern, though the things are 
before his eyes, and the likeness, says the 
former, "plain as day." There are tribes that 
have names for a couple, a brace, a pair, a 
yoke, a span, a deuce; but no name, like hvo 
for what is common to all these, no conscious- 
ness of that kind of resemblance in them. 

Salutary inability to generalize, to burst the 
bonds that time and place and circumstance 
have imposed on us! Note in what precisely 
this inability consists. We who have seen the 
likeness over and over again, who have named 
it, and named things as having this likeness, 
forget that there must have been for a long 
time an utter lack of interest in these aspects 
of things; how does Two concern even you 
independently of other considerations? We 
are hardly aware how feeble the beginnings 
of memory must be; how frequently an 
experience must be repeated before it can be 
recalled. Weakness of imagination, the 
inability to present to one's self what is distant 
or different, is one feature of the slow growth 
of perceptions. One consciousness excludes 
another, and a wide survey of particulars is 
impossible. Fanciful and irrelevant general- 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO 1 87 

izations are easy and common enough in the 
first stages of existence; but they exclude 
relevant and exemplifiable generalizations 
from the minds of philosophers of to-day; 
witness the many attempts to find analogies 
between conceptions of metaphysicians and 
misapprehended mathematics. It is hard for 
man to generalize; it is harder for him to 
abstract. Even when he is beginning to dis- 
cern what there is common to his eyes, his 
cheeks, his hands, his lips, his feet, his ears; 
even when the glimmer of a sense is slowly 
emerging that all these things, amid all their 
unlikenesses, have something in which they 
are alike; even then he can only think of this 
something in terms of his own experience. 
To call up Two to the minds of his fellows, 
as to his own, he points to the lips, the eyes, 
to a cleft stick. He learns very gradually to 
drop off the non-essentials, and to find out' 
what the non-essentials are. He cannot as 
yet see that all the really important and useful 
elements of the idea, are present in these dots 
or specks ( . . ), even here mixed with much 
that is extraneous. No; when he thinks Two, 
long after he has attained the general con- 
ception, he can include under it, assimilate to 
it, only the most concrete phenomena. All 
his Twos are blue or yellow, sweet or sour, 
alive or dead; they are even virtuous or 



I 88 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

VICIOUS, perishable or eternal. He has not 
extricated his conception from the bewildering 
eddyings of the matter in which it is immersed. 
Even we who try to think Two with a minimum 
of representation, cannot think it without some 
representation, though it be but two points 
flung at random in space; that is, if we think 
it, or attempt to think it. We use it a great 
deal without thinking it at all. 

Here then is a fact altogether noteworthy. 
After men had struggled for ages to gain this 
very useful conception, for useful in the course 
of time it had become, — after they had given 
it a name and a symbol; after they had dis- 
cerned many of its properties and relations to 
other numbers — there were trained a class of 
men whose thoughts had to be concentrated 
on the symbol, never diverted to the thing it 
stood for. Rather let m.e say (for the symbol 
is itself a thing): When it had been found out 
that one thing always went with another thing 
(as 2 with . . ), they turned their attention to 
one of these things and withdrew it from the 
other. There are thousands of accountants 
and calculators who have no occasion from one 
year's end to another to pay any heed to what 
their numerals stand for. They manipulate 
numerals and figures, and not only manipulate 
them with fingers and pen, but turn them over 
in their minds, thinking no more of the 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO 1 89 

numbers than a calculating-machine in which 
metal numerals are sliding and rolling to and 
fro. Why, children might be taught, children 
have been taught, to perform numeral addition, 
numeral subtraction, and many other pro- 
cesses of pure calculation with symbols in 
mind or on paper, without as much as being 
made to suspect that they implied numbers at 
all or the relations of numbers. 

Such substitutive signs, as they have been 
called, are of very great utility. Skill in their 
employment can be acquired only by attend- 
ing in early life to their relations to one 
another, apart from their relation to the 
things for which they are substituted. Such 
absorption of the mind in one of two related 
sets of things has sometimes been unduly 
reprobated. We need great calculators, expert 
accountants, rapid cipherers. For the services 
that these render a large contingent must be 
trained till the practice of their art becomes 
their chief pleasure; and yet it is not the 
training for those who are to do other things. 

But let us return to our number. While 
this Two was getting himself established amid 
curious concretions and limitations, with looks 
very different from those of his purified and 
refined successor of to-day. Three and Four 
were also growing into view and not Three 
and Four alone. For these things re-act on 



190 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

one another. When a few have gained a solid 
footing, others are soon assembled around 
them. Some comparisons must have been 
made, some relations discerned among them, 
even while they were in process of develop- 
ment. There was thus a network, an interac- 
tion of Twos and Fours and Fives; a body of 
truths which must have seemed something 
wonderful to savage minds, if savage minds 
ever wonder. When was the great truth 
beheld for the first time, I do not say estab- 
lished, that two stones and two stones are 
four stones? You fancy that four could not 
have been named without thinking of Twos. 
You can tell at a glance the number of stones 
in a small heap, yet you cannot tell without 
careful examination, how many a heap has in 
it that is only a little larger. You see the 
number of the small heap apparently as 
readily as you see any aspect of it. It would 
perhaps be hard to persuade you that anyone 
ever experimented to find whether the result 
w^ould be changed by taking another set of 
stones or changing the arrangement of them, 
whether indeed two and two sticks would 
behave in this respect like two and two 
stones. "Experiment" and **sticks" and 
"stones'* and "two" itself are all too definite 
terms with which to describe the movements 
of nascent intelligence. These words did not 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO IQI 

then exist nor the classifications they denote 
with all their manifold implications. Multi- 
tudes of sensations (though "sensation" is itself 
too definite a word) must have occurred in 
ever varied combinations before even a stick 
or a stone, to say nothing of a Two, was dis- 
tinguishable. 

The processes of addition, subtraction, and 
so forth, mean to most of us **figuring" either 
in our head, as we say, or on paper; but these 
processes were once, were for a long time, are 
even now over most of the earth, processes 
that involve muscular exertion and the moving 
and grouping of external objects. There was 
the process of aggregation, the process of 
bringing a flock together to be counted. It 
must have been a long step in advance when 
it was perceived that a man might go from 
field to field, dropping a pebble into a pouch 
for every sheep, and get the correct result by 
counting the pebbles. But this talk of flocks, 
fields and pebbles is a mere travesty of the 
actual process, which does not admit of any 
brief description. 

Two ones, two twos, two threes, and so on, 
one two, two twos, three twos and the like 
must have been ofteii thought of and talked 
of before this way of thinking and speaking 
found philosophers to puzzle. How could the 
same thing be at one and the same time both 



192 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

one and not one, or both two and not two; or 
how could it be called at once one and two? 
But the one and the two of the workers and 
investigators and scientists were not the one 
and the two of the philosophers. The worlds 
accordingly went on their way undisturbed by 
the difficulties that the philosopher t/. j' to 
open their eyes to. Those engaged in buying 
and selling, in measuring and counting, in the 
use of numbers, were not troubling themselves 
with the search after the Real Two, the 
Essentially Existent Two, the Hcingly Hcing 
Two, and the Real One, the Essentially Exist- 
ent One, the Beingly Being One; but such 
things the philosopher cared for. 

Twos then had become known and used. 
Stones and sticks, things animate as' well as 
things inanimate, things of all kinds, had 
slowly revealed an aspect common to them all, 
that everywhere among them were Twos. A 
symbol was found for a Two; the same symbol 
was used for each and every Two. This 
symbol all but dislodged, from some minds at 
least, the thing it stood for, till it seemed to 
these minds that the two itself did not exist 
or was not necessary; somewhat as bills and 
cheques have replaced gold and silver. But 
the philosopher was not to be cheated in that 
way, he was not to be paid with words and 
sigfns. He started out in search of the Real 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO I93 

One and the Real Two. He could not help 
doing this. His thought was not so much 
more developed than that of his fellows as 
they both perhaps supposed. He simply 
asked himself questions which others were too 
busy to ask, for one reason; and he often went 
round and round in one spot, asking his ques- 
tion over and over again from mere force of 
habit. It is often so when new generalizations 
come into view. I do not mean those pulpit 
and platform generalizations which re-state 
resemblances which have been known and 
named for ages; but those generalizations 
which involve hidden and hitherto unperceiveH 
resemblances. What was the philosopher's 
question? 

These apples are Two; there are Two trees; 
here are Two stones; these pencils are Two. 
Now the Two that is in the apples is not their 
color or scent or shape or size or taste; and 
yet it must be something — else why call the 
apples Two? It must be a reality; for the 
apples may change and decay and wither, but 
Two abides. Even if the apples perish 
utterly, arc we to suppose that Two perishes 
with them? Might we but find out what this 
Two really is! Surely it is not to be discerned 
with bodily eyes. Is the Two in the stones, 
the same as the Two in the apples, or is it a 
distinct Two? Can there be as many really 



194 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

existent Twos as there are transitory, perish- 
able and material Twos? And what can be 
their relation to one another and to the Twos 
of the sensible world? Or is there only one 
Really Existent Two that pervades and per- 
meates all the perceivable Twos? How are 
these questions to be answered? But a worse 
entanglement remains. May not the mind 
be deceived and merely fancy that it beholds 
the Real Two amid the Twos of sense, or apart 
from them, mistaking for the reality some 
adumbration and reflection thereof? some 
dream or vision or memory? Through sense, 
through imagination, through intellect, we 
may rise higher and higher to a purer, a more 
real and permanent Two; but are we sure 
that we have reached the Two in itself, by 
itself? the Two from which all other Twos (so- 
called) derive the property of being Two by 
being participants in the nature of the Ideal- 
Real? With his mind fixed on Two's unchang- 
ing clime, how he despised those Twos of the 
ordinary man's experience. It was The Two 
that he worshipped, not this Two and that 
Two. Was not this most excellent fooling? or 
was it unfathomable wisdom? Both views are 
still entertained. I have used the word 
**number" as if Two had always been a num- 
ber, as if it had always been recognized as 
such. To many of the ancients one was not 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO 1 95 

a number, nor were there such things as 
fractional numbers, as our school-books define 
them, nor any incommenswirable numbers 
(incommensurable quantities indeed) still less 
negative and imaginary and complex num- 
bers — nothing but positive integers greater 
than one. It seems that it took centuries for 
Two to get recognized as belonging even to 
this grade of numbers, or rather for the 
resemblances between Two and Three and 
Four and I'ive and the rest to be discerned. 

It was long debated for what reason, on 
what ground. Two was called a number, what 
property or properties it had to entitle it to 
rank as such. Resemblances had been felt, 
convenience had been consulted, names had 
been given, inconsistencies had been intro- 
duced, difficulties had been encountered — that 
Two appeared when a stick was laid by 
another; and when a stick was severed. Two 
likewise appeared. This something or other, 
no one could tell what, that was meant when 
Two was called a number, what else should it 
be, the philosopher opined, but the Really 
Existent Number, of whose nature the Really 
Existent Two partook in some mysterious 
way, not unlike that perhaps in which the 
Twos of sense had the Really Existent Two 
totally* and simultaneously present in each 
and all of them, being, for instance, wholly 



196 SWAIN SCHOOL LECTURES 

present in each of the six Twos that are found 
in four. 

This explanation of the considerations that 
justified the placing of Two among the 
numbers, was unintelligible to some; but 
those who understand it or revere it, find that 
it renders impossible any other solution — 
undesirable at any rate, if not impossible. 

The word "Two" comes of an ancient race 
with many kindred dispersed through many 
lands; but where the family originated or with 
what humbler meanings they consorted in 
their beginnings it is difficult to ascertain. 
With regard to the descent of its fellow, the 
character ''2," many plausible conjectures 
have been made. But the histories of ''Two** 
and **2" might never have been, or been very 
different, without affecting the number Two. 
This is any one of the pairs of which we are 
in any way conscious; this is all of them; this 
is what is common to them all; this is some- 
thing abstracted from them all, existing 
either alone by itself, or in some mind, or not 
existing at all but in its symbol, or existing in 
some utterly inconceivable way; this has been 
forgotten, and "2" alone thought of. Hut the 
number Two, the numeral adjective. or sub- 
stantive or pronoun Two, the numeric symbol 
2, are already discerned by some to be on the 
way to yet further changes, and likely to 



SOME ORIGINS OF THE NUMBER TWO 1 97 

become associated with something as different 
from each as each is from the other. We who 
are not mathematicians can only behold these 
transformations from afar. 

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